SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Foundry Networks®, Inc. (NASDAQ: FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced that the award-winning, multi-terabit capacity NetIron XMR series of IPv4/IPv6/MPLS Internet routers and the NetIron MLX Series of metro routers now offer Packet over SONET/SDH (POS) interfaces. This expansion of Foundry's leading router product lines will offer Internet/transit providers, metro operators, cable, and wireless operators the ability to continue leveraging existing SONET/SDH infrastructure to deliver broadband advanced services. With the new SONET/SDH wide area networking capabilities, Foundry's XMR Internet router family now delivers a complete IPv4, IPv6 and MPLS routing solution set with greater performance per rack unit than Cisco CRS-1 and Juniper T-Series routers, scaling up to 2 Billion packets per second in a single chassis router at a fraction of the price.

"While the current trend is to migrate to Ethernet, many carriers worldwide have extensive SONET/SDH networks that they still want to leverage," said Sam Masud, principal analyst, carrier infrastructure, Frost & Sullivan. "A solution that brings Ethernet and SONET/SDH together on a high-performance and scalable core and metro router offers a practical way for managing the transition from the legacy infrastructure to next-generation Ethernet networks. With the new line cards, Foundry Networks has raised the price-performance benchmark."

Since many service providers made significant investments in SONET/SDH infrastructures over the past decade, the NetIron XMR and MLX SONET/SDH WAN solutions will enable service providers to deliver seamless and cost effective services across SONET/SDH and Ethernet infrastructures, offering massive capacities at the best price per megabit. The new portfolio of POS interface modules will include a variety of speeds and port densities to address a wide range of deployment scenarios. The new SONET/SDH Interface speeds range from OC-12 (STM-4), OC-48 (STM-16) to OC-192 (STM-64). In addition, the POS portfolio will feature densities of 2, 4, and 8 ports per OC-12/48 interface module and 1, and 2 ports per OC-192 interface module.

With these new POS modules, the NetIron XMR Series now scales to 64 OC-192/SDH-64 and 256 OC-48/SDH-16 ports, becoming the highest density wire-speed SONET/SDH capable Internet routers in the industry. The modules are all designed for pluggable optical transceivers for maximum versatility allowing operators to choose from a wide range of optical reaches up to 80km.

"Hurricane Electric is an Internet backbone and colocation provider," said Mike Leber, Hurricane Electric President. "We need a powerful routing solution that supports both SONET and 10 Gigabit Ethernet so that we can leverage our current infrastructure and deliver the high-performance our customers demand, at a total cost of ownership not possible with legacy carrier equipment vendors. The combination of SONET support with a Next Generation Ethernet platform enables Hurricane to be highly competitive. Foundry is one of the first networking vendors to successfully deliver Packet over SONET capabilities in a future-proof platform with compelling price-performance, scalability, resiliency and reliability."

Foundry Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY)