The inherent effect of these innovations is a highly efficient data center solution that collapses server connectivity within the data center into fewer devices, reducing power consumption, lowering cooling requirements, and requiring less rack space, which further supports Foundry's ongoing green networking initiatives. This also results in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a faster return on investment (ROI).

Delivering the Foundry Data Center Vision
To address performance, virtualization, convergence and efficiency challenges, Foundry is announcing a new wave of products designed to deliver on the defined vision. The first set of new products include new high-density interface modules for the Foundry industry leading BigIron RX switch and NetIron MLX router platforms.

Since their introduction, the BigIron RX series switches have consistently reset the bar for high-performance, high-density, resilient switching for data centers. A new 16-port 10GbE interface module for the BigIron RX switch series will further increase scalability up to 512 ports of 10GbE server connections in a single switch. This, in addition to the series leading capacity of up to 1,536 GbE ports per system, provides data center architects with unmatched capacities for server aggregation, for both GbE and 10GbE servers, allowing for fewer switches to maximize performance and optimize power and cooling efficiency. The inherent hardware and software resiliency of the series, combined with its support for industry standard and proprietary rapid convergence protocols further enable high-availability data center services.

The NetIron MLX routers complement the BigIron RX switches by providing high-performance, high-end routing, multiple virtual routing, and advanced security capabilities in data center applications. The NetIron MLX series is unmatched in its IPv4, IPv6, and Multi-VRF wire-speed routing performance without compromise. In addition to the series' industry-leading capacity of up to 128 10GbE wire-speed routing ports per system, a new high-density GbE interface module for the NetIron MLX router series will boost the series capacity up to 1,536 ports in a single router. The new module will enable data center designs based on collapsed access and aggregation layers with virtualized routing services extended into the access layer for maximizing performance and enhancing manageability.

The NetIron MLX routers deliver high-end data center routing and aggregation capabilities beyond high port density. It offers unmatched network scalability with up to 32 10GbE links per link aggregation and sophisticated link aggregation and equal cost multi-path (ECMP) load-sharing algorithms. With this industry-leading high-bandwidth capability, the MLX provides data center architects with ample network capacity and scalability to support service growth in large enterprise and Internet data centers, as well as up to 320 Gbps inter-switch and data center connectivity.

These new products, combined with Foundry's visionary architectures, which include lossless fabrics and advanced distributed buffering design, deliver performance, flexibility, scalability, capacity, and power and cooling efficiency benefits to data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) environments.