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Rolling Review: Foundry's Network Design Builds In Capacity
9/5/2008 |
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Foundry Networks has a long history of building fast switching gear. Although it's still a relatively small player in terms of market size compared with the likes of Hewlett-Packard and 3Com, Foundry does have legs in the data center. And, according to market researcher Heavy Reading, Foundry is No. 3 in the carrier Ethernet switching and routing space. All that plus good technology made the company attractive to Brocade, which recently announced plans to acquire Foundry, broadening Brocade's product offerings to a combined slate of data and storage network products.
Our original network design request for proposal for this Rolling Review took into account the way networks often grow: Infrastructure is purchased and installed as new facilities are needed. Mergers and acquisitions bring along their own hardware. For TacDoh--our fictional deep-fried dessert company for this Rolling Review--the result was a network that contained a hodgepodge of switch models, firmware releases, and vendors. The RFP is a chance to bring the entire organization onto a single platform and build in features like redundancy at the hardware and network layers, simplify management, leverage advanced traffic and network management to support real-time media, and gain additional security features.
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