10-Gbps metro Ethernet - Product Spot - Foundry Networks' NetIron 40G - Brief Article

Telecommunications Americas, June, 2003

Foundry Networks

www.foundrynet.com

Foundry Networks has upped the ante in the metro Ethernet market by unveiling a 10-Gbps Ethernet router. The NetIron 40G is aimed both at carriers that want to build high-capacity metro Ethernet networks and for peering between ISPs. Foundry may have surpassed competitors with the eight-slot 40G box offering 1.2 Tbps of switching capacity in a third of a rack (4 Tbps in a rack) and providing 32 10-Gbps Ethernet ports (96 ports in a rack). Each line has 160 Gbps of switching capacity and supports four 10-Gbps Ethernet ports. Foundry notes that this future-proofs the box for 40-Gbps Ethernet as each slot has 40-Gbps full-duplex access to the backplane. Foundry claims the non-blocking architecture of the device delivers wire-speed performance to every slot and every port. There is a separate 640 Gbps backplane switch fabric for the data path and a "mini" 20-Gbps switch fabric for the control path. According to Foundry, the system can handle 480 million 64-byte packets per second (1.5 pps per rack) and scale to s upport 4 million BGP4 routes for Internet peering. The boxes will initially ship supporting the 10-Gbps LAN physical layer spec; support for the slightly less than full 10-Gbps WAN physical layer spec will come toward the end of the year.