SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Foundry Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY), a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, today announced a family of web accelerators designed to optimize the delivery of web-enabled applications and to scale web server farms and applications. Unlike many solutions on the market, the new ServerIron®SA accelerators combine best-of-breed SSL acceleration with high-performance web content compression to maximize application performance and bandwidth utilization. The combination of a ServerIronSA accelerator and ServerIron application switch provides a highly scalable traffic management solution for server farms supporting a mix of web and non-web IP applications to deliver optimized performance, robust security, high availability and business continuity. ServerIronSA accelerators implement standards-based HTTP compression techniques to reduce bandwidth utilization by as much as 75%, significantly improving application performance and throughput. The ServerIronSA family includes a model with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification for use by government and other organizations requiring this additional level of security to manage their infrastructure.

Many enterprise and service provider organizations rely on their web application servers to process SSL-encrypted web traffic. As SSL traffic demand increases, server-based SSL termination can become a performance bottleneck. The ServerIronSA web accelerators solve this problem with centralized SSL processing and HTTP compression, offloading the servers of computationally-intensive SSL processing and inefficient certificate management. By deploying a ServerIronSA accelerator with a ServerIron application switch, customers benefit from improved application performance, centralized certificate management, extensive SSL scalability and high availability for web and non-web applications. Additionally, ServerIron global load balancing can be used to provide optimized traffic distribution and disaster recovery across multiple data center sites.

Key features of Foundry’s application switching solution include:

“The ServerIronSA family of web accelerators complements our performance-leading line of Layer 4-7 application switches, providing our customers with a powerful and complete solution for securing, scaling and optimizing the data center,” said Bob Schiff, vice president and general manager of the Layer 4-7 and Security Products Business Unit for Foundry. “Our customers are seeing significant growth in SSL traffic. The ServerIronSA products provide a scalable and high-performance solution for managing these applications. Additionally, integrated support for transparent HTTP compression improves application performance and can reduce bandwidth costs in the wide area.”

Foundry Networks Inc.