High-End Swit ch-Router

By Monua Janah

oundry Networks Inc. plans to ship high-end, chassis-based combination switch-routers designed to speed throughput in LANs where large amounts of data are exchanged.

The products, to be sold under the BigIron name, will complement the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's stackable Gigabit Ethernet switches and switch-routers, which were among the first Gigabit Ethernet switching products when they hit the market last year.

BigIron will be available in four-slot and eight-slot versions, called the BigIron 4000 and the BigIron 8000, supporting hardware-based routing of Internet Protocol and IPX traffic. The 4000 can be configured to a maximum of 64 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 72 10/100-Mbps ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The 8000 can support 64 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 152 10/100-Mbps ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Besides raw bandwidth, the devices offer features, such as priority queuing, that let customers map bandwidth more efficiently to applications or groups of users. They also support a variety of ways to configure virtual LANs.

The products can be especially useful for companies that must process large amounts of data as part of their product-development cycles, or for businesses such as publishing companies, where data is the product.

Incyte Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., supplier of human-genome databases to pharmaceutical makers, is one such company in the bio-informatics industry. "A lot of processing goes into making our final products," says Philip Kwan, manager of network operations and planning at Incyte, which is testing BigIron. "There are hundreds of thousands of raw files that need to be massaged by supercomputers."

Incyte has been using Fou ndry's FastIron and TurboIron stackable products to provide a redundant network linking its powerful computers. The company chose the Foundry devices because they have relatively few bugs and offer features such as support for the OSPF routing protocol-and because "they were the fastest that we tested," Kwan says.

The BigIron 4000 chassis will ship in March, priced at $3,995. The 8000 chassis will be available in July, at $4,995. An eight-port Gigabit Ethernet module is priced at $16,995; a 20-port 10/100 module goes for $8,995.

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