* Foundry Networks bundles two products that go together
Foundry Networks this week combined its application switching and Web acceleration products in a single package.
The package combines the ServerIronXL Layer 4-7 application switch with the ServerIronSA 100 Web accelerator. Foundry says it is targeting the package at those companies that need high availability to deliver IP and Web services.
The ServerIronXL balances traffic loads among servers with Layer 7 content switching. It comes with either 16 or 24 ports of 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet to connect to servers. (The switch being used in the package has 16 ports.) Two Gigabit Ethernet ports are optional. In addition to the server load balancing, Foundry says the switch can shield server farms from denial-of-service attacks, viruses and worms. If no local servers are available, the switch can send requests to remote servers as a backup.
The ServerIronSA 100 Web accelerator is designed to improve performance of applications using Secure Sockets Layer for security.
The ServerIronSA 100 is at the low end of Foundry’s line. It can support 200 SSL connections per second and 100M bit/sec of compressed content throughput, the company says. Higher-end models can support as many as 11,000 SSL transactions per second and throughput as high as 700M bit/sec.
The ServerIronSA would receive and terminate all SSL connections, decrypt the traffic and convert it to clear-text HTML, then send it on to the ServerIronXL. The ServerIronSA authenticates clients through SSL certificates, and RADIUS and LDAP authentication mechanisms are also supported.
The new package, called SI-XL16-SSL, is available now and starts at $17,495 list.
