New features enable network upgrades

Datacenter consolidation and the growth in 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks is leading switch vendors and network appliance providers to outfit new products with high-performance features to handle these more demanding environments.

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This week Force10 Networks will increase the density of its TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers to more than 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports per chassis with a new line of High Density 90-port line cards.

“These systems are designed to accommodate the increasing demand for bandwidth and have the capacity to accommodate growth for what we estimate to be 10 years,” said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10. “These types of networks used to be relegated to the scientific and research areas, but now we’re seeing more commercial applications.”

These new, larger, higher-capacity networks have several advantages for IT departments, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group. “Many companies can save money by reducing the number of datacenters they have when they move to these high-capacity systems, but they also receive just as much if not more benefit from the reduced management load,” he said.

Momentum Research estimates that 55 percent of enterprises are upgrading their datacenters within a year. This helps drive demand for high-density, highly scalable products, Kerravala said. Questions remain for IT departments, however. “IT departments could deploy, say, just two datacenters, but to just have two may be a pretty big pill to swallow in terms of security and backup,” he said.

Force10 is not the only company focusing on the high-end datacenter. Recently, Cisco Systems and Foundry Networks released high-end switches and Extreme Networks unveiled a security product.

Extreme Networks is aiming to reinforce security with a product designed for the 10-Gigabit Ethernet market. The company is integrating security into the Ethernet switch, combining its Clear-Flow security-rules engine with its new Sentriant VSR (Virtual Security Resource) appliance.

“Network availability is the cornerstone of performance yet is jeopardized by attacks that choke off critical network and security resources,” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, vice president of worldwide marketing at Extreme Networks. The Sentriant VSR automatically detects and mitigates damaging network attacks at 1Gbps and 10Gbps. The appliance ships this week.

“Enterprises are looking for more centralized defense strategies so they can incorporate security across multiple links running at either 1Gbps or 10Gbps,” Gopalakrishnan said. “Most IDS/IPS solutions can work to block signature-based attacks. They scale only to 1Gbps and work with a single link. That usually requires multiple devices to secure the network.” 

Kerravala expects more of these types of products in the future. “When you are operating at these speeds, if something gets into the network it will spread quickly, so I expect to see more security and backup devices designed for these networks,” he said.