Foundry Networks has had a busy year. First, they rolled out the ServerIronGT high-end 10 Gigbit Ethernet switches in January. In late June, they pulled the covers off the mid-range ServerIron Plus appliances.
Now, they're taking a shot at smaller-scale enterprises with the ServerIron 4G family, announced last week at Interop and expected to be available in early October.
The ServerIron 4G and 4G-SSL put an emphasis on high-availability and security for Web-enabled apps at a lower price: according to Foundry, the switches come in $20,000 to $25,000 less than comparable switches from F5 and Cisco.
"From a performance standpoint, this switch will compare more to their midlevel products," says Gopala Tumuluri, director of product marketing for Foundry Networks.
"This is for the masses," he explains. "It's got very aggressive pricing [for a] full-featured application switch solution that's really targeting the mainstream enterprises for internal applications and small-scale external applications."
The new switches have redundant, hotswappable power supplies for failover protection, a dedicated processor for management and control and four ports for connectivity (hence the "4G" name), all copper and
fiber dual ports. This allows the "customer to never make a bad choice. However their network is designed, this can slide in pretty easily," says Tumuluri.
As more elite switch features, like integrated hardware for SSL acceleration, trickle down to smaller appliances, the main differentiators between Foundry's 4G switches and their larger brethren are traffic volume and number of users.
This isn't an SMB box, though. "Our primary target is enterprises of 1,000 or over," Tumuluri says, adding that the 4G appliances may be a good fit for remote offices that have apps and services requiring high performance and security features. "Even the very large enterprises may have some internal apps that are so small or used by so few groups in the organization, that they would benefit from a small switch like this."
Pricing for the ServerIron 4G starts at $11,995; the 4G-SSL, which includes SSL acceleration, comes in at $14,995.
Posted by Stephanie McLoughlin on September 25, 2006 04:35 PM
