Foundry Network Product Blitz Targets Speed, Security, IP Networks

Foundry Network has released a blitz of products, including high-speed switches, security products, and acceleration devices for Web services and IP networks.

It expanded its ServerIron GT E-series family of application and traffic management switches with what it calls the industry's only purpose-built and expandable high-density 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet switch. The ServerIronGT E2404 switch supports 24 ports of Fast Ethernet and 4 ports of Gigabit Ethernet, and is designed for Fast Ethernet server farm environments that require Gigabit network connectivity with capacity for future growth.

ServerIronGT E2404 will be available in February 2005.

Foundry also announced a family of web accelerators designed to optimize the delivery of web-enabled applications and to scale web server farms and applications. The new ServerIronSA accelerators combine SSL acceleration with high-performance web content compression to maximize application performance and bandwidth utilization.

The combination of a ServerIronSA accelerator and ServerIron application switch provides a highly scalable traffic management solution for server farms supporting a mix of web and non-web IP applications to deliver optimized performance, robust security, high availability and business continuity.ServerIronSA accelerators implement standards-based HTTP compression techniques to reduce bandwidth utilization by as much as 75%, significantly improving application performance and throughput. The ServerIronSA family includes a model with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification for use by government and other organizations requiring this additional level of security to manage their infrastructure.

The ServerIronSA family of web application accelerators will be available in February 2005

The company also announced that it has doubled the performance of its hardware-based Denial of Service (DoS) SYN-Guard security shield on its ServerIron family of Layer 4-7 application switches. ServerIron modular systems implement advanced security algorithms in programmable network processors to achieve defend against Denial of Service attacks that can threaten the integrity and availability of data center operations. ServerIron SYN-Guard can defend against high-velocity threats at up to 10 Gigabit rates when the application switches are deployed in a high- availability, active-active configuration.

Additionally, Foundry has added protection from thirty different types of DoS attacks and security enhancements to its Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB). GSLB provides optimized traffic distribution across multiple data centers including automatic failover in the event of a server or site failure.

TrafficWorks Release 9.3 OS featuring enhanced Denial of Service performance and functionality will be available in January 2005.0