Purpose-built Feature Set for Demanding Networks
INDUSTRY LEADING PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY
The BigIron RX Series is the industry’s most powerful switch family, delivering up to 3.2 terabits per second data throughput per system.
HIGH-AVAILABILITY DESIGN
Redundant and resilient design ensures high availability operation for demanding environments.
tRedundant, hot-swappable components provide non-stop service delivery
–Management module: Systems configured with dual management modules with sub-second detection and fail-over
–Switch Fabric Element Redundancy: Systems configured with a redundant switch fabric module support millisecond fail-over performance
–Hitless Management Failover (HMF): Stateful failover ensures that the forwarding engines on the line modules are not impacted by a management failover. This capability enables non-stop packet forwarding in the event of a management module failover.
–Redundant Power Supplies: All three chassis support M+N power module redundancy for AC and DC power configurations.
tDistributed Forwarding Architecture—Advanced network processors, high-performance CPU and high-speed memory on each interface module provide for a scalable high-performance architecture
tIEEE 802.3ad link aggregation up to eight links—Scalable,cross-module trunking provides for resilient high-capacity connections between switches.
tResilient Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols provide fast service restoration in event of link or equipment failures
–Metro Ring Protocol optimized for ring topologies, IEEE 802.1s and 802.1w for general Layer 2 topologies, VSRP for redundant switch configurations and VRRP/ VRRP-E for redundant router configurations, ECMP for routed backbones
ROBUST LAYER 3 FEATURE SET
Foundry’s IronWare software suite includes scalable EGP and IGP routing protocols.
tBGPv4—Scalable to 4 million routes, 500 peers and 14,000 attributes with MR2 management module
tOSPF—Scalable to over 400,000 routes
tIS-IS—Support for Level 1 and Level 2, includes 25,000 routes and 512 adjacencies
tFoundry Direct Routing (FDR)—The forwarding information base (FIB) is downloaded to the hardware-based forwarding engine on each line module. This memory can be pre-populated with
as many as 512,000 IPv4 and 64,000 IPv6 routes for wire-speed routing performance.
tPolicy-based Routing (PBR)—Support customizable routing policies using access control lists (ACLs). This feature can be used to balance network usage by controlling the network paths for different traffic flows.
tComprehensive multicast feature set—Provides hardware- based support for a number of multicast protocols including MSDP, PIM-SM (Sparse Mode) and PIM-DM (Dense Mode), allowing network managers to efficiently deploy next-generation multicast applications
tVRRP and VRRPE (Enhanced VRRP)—Enables the BigIron RX to operate as a backup router to other network routers. In the event of a router failure, the BigIron RX will automatically and seamlessly perform the tasks of the failed router.
INDUSTRY LEADING LAYER 2 FEATURES
To provide self-healing topologies in Layer 2 configurations, the BigIron RX supports industry standard Ethernet protocols including Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Rapid Spanning Tree (RSTP), per VLAN STP (PVST) and per VLAN group STP (PVGST). The BigIron RX also supports Foundry’s Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) for sub-second service restoration in ring topologies. Additionally, the BigIron RX supports multi-instance spanning tree, VLAN topology grouping and VLAN tunneling for advanced Layer 2 service configurations.
tMetro Ring Protocol (MRP)—An alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol, MRP provides sub-second fault detection and fail-over for Ethernet ring topologies. MRP works in conjunction with VSRP and 802.3ad based link aggregation to provide bandwidth scalability and SONET-like resilience.
tVirtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP)—Supportssub-second fault detection and fail-over for mesh topologies in which redundant switches provide back-up operation for one another
tSingle-instanceSTP—Provides a single instance of STP to run on all port-based VLANs within a single device, interoperable with others that are 802.1d compliant
tRapid Spanning Tree Protocol based on IEEE 802.1w— Dramatically improves the spanning tree convergence time to sub-second by automatically renegotiating port roles in case of a link failure without relying on timers
