Force10 Brings Scalability To Networks With 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet Ports

Radically altering the economics of networking, Force10 Networks today introduced the industry's first 90-port Gigabit Ethernet line cards, increasing the density of its TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers to more than 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports per chassis, nearly three times the density of competitive solutions. As the first entry in Force10's new High Density portfolio, the 90-port line card sets a new industry benchmark for Gigabit Ethernet density and brings an unsurpassed level of scalability to the TeraScale E-Series. "As our data processing needs grow, we require a network that can both accommodate today's traffic and scale to support future increases without overly complicating our infrastructure," said Preston Carter, senior network engineer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, the world's largest weather data archive. "With the high Gigabit Ethernet density of the TeraScale E-Series, we have the capacity to scale far into the future to accommodate the projected growth of our network without an upgrade or even the need for additional systems." Force10's High Density 90-port Gigabit Ethernet card, combined with the industry-leading 14-slot capacity of the TeraScale E-Series, delivers unmatched investment protection, allowing IT managers to cost effectively build an unprecedented level of scalability into their networks. With 90 ports of Gigabit Ethernet on a single line card, IT managers can process more traffic per input slot while conserving space for future use. And with 14 slots per system, the TeraScale E-Series provides more capacity to accommodate increasing demand for bandwidth. "Force10's High Density portfolio and the unique architecture of the TeraScale E-Series deliver long-term investment protection with revolutionary scalability that can accommodate growth for ten or more years," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. "With the TeraScale E-Series we have refined the art of high density switching, so it is a natural and logical transition for us to leverage that expertise to broaden our market with the 90-port card." According to Momentum Research, 55 percent of enterprise IT budgets will be dedicated to upgrading the data center within the next year as their current deployments reach end of life. For the next generation of deployments, data center consolidation and the move to longer product life cycles is driving the demand for high density products that can add years of scalability to the network. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers unmatched density and performance, processing an industry-leading one billion packets per second. With built-in redundancy and an architecture that distributes switching, routing and management functionality between three processing units, the TeraScale E-Series also delivers the resiliency required to ensure maximum network uptime. Recently, Force10 launched its S50 data center switch, the industry's first fixed configuration stackable switch purpose-built for the data center. By bringing the performance and resiliency of the TeraScale E-Series to the server edge with the S50, Force10 enables a reliable end-to-end solution for the data center.