Force10 Networks Awarded Patent for Unique Backplane Design

Force10 Networks, the pioneer in Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet innovation, today announced that it has been awarded a patent for its groundbreaking advancements in developing the high capacity backplane that powers the TeraScale E-Series. Force10 has more than 50 patents and patents pending for its innovations in terabit scale switching and routing. "At the heart of the TeraScale E-Series are the patented designs and innovations developed by the Force10 engineering team that revolutionized the way the industry builds high performance networking equipment," said Sachi Sambandan, vice president of engineering at Force10 Networks. "By challenging the traditional architectures of switches and routers, Force10 engineers developed a product that enables network operators to do more with less." With its innovative and patent-protected design, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series can process one billion packets per second, making it the industry's first true Terabit switch/router. The industry-leading Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities and unmatched resiliency of the TeraScale E-Series enable network operators to process more traffic on a single system, reducing network complexity and total cost of ownership. The technological and design advances developed by Force10 drive the industry-leading performance and resiliency of the TeraScale E-Series. Force10's passive copper backplane leverages advanced multi-layer design and manufacturing techniques to scale to 5 Terabits per second, the highest in the industry. In addition to providing immense scalability, the backplane also increases network resiliency by eliminating all active components. The combination of the capacity and the resiliency of the TeraScale E-Series backplane enables network operators to migrate from 10 Gigabit Ethernet to both 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet without the expense of a forklift upgrade. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series also employs a patent-protected use of memory to provide more flexible and granular features to network operators. Rather than allocate high touch features, such as bandwidth shaping and access control lists, on a per port basis, the TeraScale E-Series is designed to allocate features where and when the customer needs them most. Over 100 customers worldwide have deployed the TeraScale E-Series in their data centers, cluster computing environments and local area networks. Research and education environments, the government, service providers, portals, enterprises and financial organizations are leveraging the unique architecture and reliability features of the TeraScale E-Series to increase the performance and resiliency of their networks.