Foundry Networks NetIron Switching Router and FastIron II
Foundry Networks submitted two products for this roundup. The NetIron Switching Router is a 16-port 10/100 switch with two optional Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The FastIron II, our Editor's Choice, is a 72-port switch with two, four or eight Gigabit Ethernet ports in a chassis-like form factor. Both products have the same feature set, though the bigger FastIron II has a much larger backplane.

Unlike the Extreme products, the NetIron and FastIron II products are designed to act more like routers than switches, which is apparent from the former's name and from the switch configuration: Out of the box, each interface on the switch is configured to be a router port. To enable Layer 2 bridging, you must first create a VLAN and then assign a virtual interface to it. Foundry's command-line interface bears a striking resemblance to Cisco's IOS (Internetwork Operating System) software. Users familiar with the interface and hierarchy will be pleased to see how quickly they can adapt to the Foundry gear.

In our tests, the NetIron router demonstrated significantly less horsepower than the FastIron II. Many of the QoS and filtering features available on the NetIron had significant performance impact on the NetIron's overall throughput. These same filters had no detrimental effects on the FastIron II. Foundry engineers explained that the NetIron is based on older, first-generation hardware, and that many of the new features had been moved into hardware ASICs on the FastIron II platform. Foundry's NetIron lists for $8,995, and the pair of uplinks is $3,695. This works out to about $700 per port, a steep price for such a small box.

The NetIron didn't properly handle 802.1p frames from our Windows NT workstations. Internally, the NetIron has only two hardware queues, so only two levels of priority are supported for 802.1p QoS. Two levels of QoS leaves little room for granularity of network traffic--packets are either high priority or no priority. Enabling VLANs on the NetIron caused a 5 percent decline in our test benchmarks. Enabling Layer 4 QoS on the uplink port limited throughput to around 200,000 packets per second. At sites where significant filtering or prioritization will take place, this could be a serious liability. The FastIron II suffered no such problems.

FastIron II's bottom three slots are filled with 24-port modules that ship with the product. Starting at $14,995 for 72 ports and two gigabit uplinks, the price per port ranges from $202 per port with two gigabit uplinks to $331 per port with eight gigabit uplinks. The unit commands $2,000 per gigabit port, a price slightly higher than that of other products in this category, but the features more than make up for the additional cost.

The FastIron II is everything you could want in a Layer 3 switch, and more. The switch supports advanced filtering and QoS features not found in any other Layer 3 switch we've tested. At Layer 2, the switch can filter or assign QoS to frames based on MAC source or destination address; at Layer 3, via IP source or destination; and at Layer 4, via TCP or UDP (User Datagram Protocol) port number. Four levels of hardware priority match Extreme's Summit offerings.

Foundry's switches are rich in features. They can route IPX 802.3 and 802.2 frames in hardware, and software-route IPX Ethernet II and Snap frames. They also support AppleTalk routing (the only switches that do so). This makes Foundry's switches an ideal replacement for large-scale enterprises with Ethernet backbones.