FastIron II Switches

The FastIron II family includes the FastIron II and FastIron II Plus for high density 10/100 to Gigabit Ethernet edge connectivity, and the FastIron II GC and the FastIron II Plus GC for high density Gigabit Ethernet copper connectivity.

The FastIron II is a redundant, non-blocking chassis-based switch that provides 72 auto-sensing, auto-negotiating 10/100 Mbps ports and from 2 to 8 Gigabit Ethernet fiber ports. Enterprises that require greater 10/100 Mbps port density can deploy the FastIron II Plus for up to 168 10/100 Mbps ports and 2 to 8 Gigabit Ethernet fiber ports, or 144 10/100 and 16 Gigabit Ethernet fiber ports.

The FastIron II GC and FastIron II Plus GC offer industry standard 1000Base-T connectivity for organizations that require greater bandwidth to power workstations and servers. The FastIron II GC is available in two base configurations, 24 1000 Mbps ports or 16 1000 Mbps ports + 24 10/100 Mbps ports. An open slot provides the flexibility for additional 10/100 or 1000 Mbps port density. The FastIron II Plus GC offers the industry's highest Gigabit Ethernet copper density with 64 ports.

All members of the FastIron II family are based on Foundry's non-blocking IronCore architecture, which ensures wire-speed performance and less than 5 microseconds of latency.

FastIron II switches support Foundry's award-winning IronWare routing services. A simple field upgrade provides IP/RIP, IPX/RIP/SAP, OSPF, AppleTalk, IGMP, DVMRP, PIM, VRRP and FSRP protocol support for full investment protection. With Foundry's IronWare routing services, FastIron II switches can be deployed as a high-density distributed switching router for enterprises that require wire-speed, multi-protocol routing at the network edge.

IronCore Architecture
The FastIron II family is built on Foundry's fully non-blocking IronCore architecture. The IronCore architecture provides switching capacity in the core and on each module. The core consists of a backplane and crosspoint switching fabric that supports up to 8 interface modules. The crosspoint switching fabric includes a high speed ASIC that provides up to 128 Gbps of effective switching capacity and 96,000,000 pps.

Each interface module utilizes a high bandwidth, shared memory switching fabric that switches up to 32 Gbps of bandwidth. This local switching fabric houses the forwarding engines and includes ASICs that provide packet switching functions such as priority handling. Each interface module also contains ASICs that perform high speed Layer 2, Layer 3 and Layer 4 look-ups and forwarding, including IP subnet lookups and packet modifications of IP and IPX packets. Additionally, each interface module has an 8 Gbps full-duplex data path to the crosspoint fabric that provides separate priority queues for each module destination.

The combination of local switching interface modules and the non-blocking crosspoint backplane delivers a two level switching system that easily scales up to 64 Gigabit Ethernet ports. To ensure compatibility with existing infrastructures and provide long-term investment protection, the architecture supports interfaces ranging from 10/100 Mbps to 1 Gbps today and 10 Gbps in the future.