2/1/2005 -- Last month, Foundry Networks announced SuperX, a new family of switches designed to flesh out its portfolio of Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet products. The SuperX switches help improve Foundry’s competitive position in the enterprise switch market, analysts say—especially against Cisco, whose Catalyst 4500 family is a much pricier alternative.

At the same time, Foundry’s new SuperX switches aren’t quite a slam dunk.

Foundry’s SuperX Layer 2 and 3 switches boast high Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet density per rack, wire-speed throughput and forwarding on every port, and a compact form factor that lets customers install as many as eight systems per seven-foot rack. In addition, SuperX switches ship support a hot-swappable, standards-based Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) upgrade module, and ship with Foundry’s IronWare reliability and security features.

Foundry positions the first of the SuperX offerings, the FastIron SuperX, for the modular wiring closet market, and says FastIron SuperX is designed to provide QoS features for VoIP applications. FastIron SuperX supports 10-, 100-, and 1000-Mbit ports, and supports optional PoE, along with Foundry’s IronShield edge security. The second offering, the TurboIron SuperX, is a full-fledged 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch, complete with 16 ports of 10-Gigabit Ethernet. It’s designed for high performance computing, aggregation and server farm applications. According to Foundry, BigIron SuperX, the final SuperX entry, is designed for small-enterprise core and metropolitan applications. It can support up to 1 million hardware routes per module, compared with 256,000 for the FastIron SuperX.

Steven Schuchart, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis, says SuperX provides good value—as far as it goes—against competitors like Cisco but lacks the availability features found in Cisco’s Catalyst 4500 line.

“[T]he new SuperX family of modular switches … provide good density, price and converged network features when compared to products such as Cisco’s Catalyst 4500, but the product has a critical flaw in that it lacks the ability to support redundant management modules,” he writes.

At the same time, Schuchart points out, few competitors can match all of the attributes of SuperX in a single box. What’s more, Schuchart says, fewer still can match the flexibility provided by SuperX. “By selecting half-slot cards for the SuperX series, Foundry made a design decision about port flexibility over port density,” he writes. “The SuperX still has good port density, but with the half-slot design, it is much more flexible in the number and type of ports that can be installed into the chassis as well as giving the customer the advantage of purchasing and deploying in smaller increments.”

For these reasons, Schuchart concludes, SuperX is an important deliverable for Foundry. “[T]his announcement represents not only major competitive price pressure, but raises the bar for features and density in the modular wiring closet or small-enterprise core spaces,” he writes. -Stephen Swoyer