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June 15, 2003
Foundry Customer Symposium
I've been attending the 3rd Annual Foundry Customer Symposium in Napa Valley the last few days. Napa is a pretty incredible area of California. We flew into Sacramento and drove through the Vaca mountains (via Route 128) on one of the funnest, curviest and most beautiful drives I've been on.
I was first introduced to Foundry when I was at Center7. That was just before the company went public, and set a near-record for first-day price "pop", and Foundry got a lot of attention as an up-and-comer.
Foundry was started with a strict focus (and big risk) on the disruptive capabilities of Gigabit Ethernet. They are a very narrowly-focused company and have been from their inception. This year, the results of that focus are becoming evident. Foundry is now Cisco's strongest contender in the Ethernet market, having pulled ahead of Extreme Networks, Enterasys, 3COM and others. They are also #1 in the Layer3 GbE market, #1 in the 10GbE market, #1 in GbE over fiber, #1 in Layer4-7, and #2 in GbE over copper. Not bad for a company that's only 7 years old. Now they are focused on what they see as more disruption to be caused by 10GbE (especially with carriers today much more interested in a cheaper replacement for OC-192 and OC-768).
Foundry announced their wireless strategy. I don't think I can say much about it, but I can say that it's very compelling and looks like it'll finally make an enterprise-class wireless network a possibility. Their standards-based strategy addresses authentication, data integrity, encryption, L2/L3 roaming, user access policy management, auditing, L2/L3 QoS, rate-limiting, and centralized wired/wireless (including APs) network management, on 802.11a/b/g networks. And it'll be available as a software upgrade for most of their switches, free to supported customers.
They also announced their new 1.2Tb/s switches, the NetIron 40G and BigIron MG8. These switches are built for high-density GigE, 10GbE and 40GbE (when available). They support 32 10GbE ports or 320 GbE (and eventually 8 40GbE) ports per chassis, with 3 chasses in a 7-foot rack. Every port wire-speed. Redundant management modules. Pretty phenomenal. And pretty reasonably-priced.
I can say that there's not much to do in Napa if you aren't a wine-drinker, especially in the evenings. But it was still a fun trip.
Posted by pete at June 15, 2003 10:51 PM
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