Sandvine Strengthens Demanding Testing Environment With Foundry's Backbone Switches

By stress testing their solutions with Foundry's advanced switching platforms, Sandvine is able to simulate a fully loaded network and guarantee the performance, reliability and resiliency of their carrier-grade products prior to customer delivery.

Sandvine develops and markets networking equipment targeted to the evolving needs of today's DSL, fiber-to-the-home, cable, and wireless broadband service providers. Sandvine's award-winning solutions identify the types and behaviors of traffic on networks enabling service providers to improve customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs and increase profitability.

"We recently selected Foundry's BigIron RX-16 switches to simulate a large high-performance broadband network environment in order to stress test Sandvine's network equipment," said Brad Siim, chief operating officer and vice president of engineering for Sandvine. "Because our testing capacity needs will increase as we serve more of the world's largest next-generation broadband networks, we are also evaluating Foundry's highly scalable NetIron® family of carrier-grade routers that deliver ultra-high capacity and cost efficient use of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10GbE."

After testing and implementing competitive solutions from other large networking vendors, Sandvine determined that Foundry's BigIron RX-16 routing switches delivered the capabilities needed to thoroughly analyze their solutions. Siim elaborated, "Our previous infrastructure was comprised of a combination of other vendor switches; since our products are unique to the market, we needed a high density GbE switch with true non-blocking performance. The BigIron RX-16 was the right fit to meet our quality assurance requirements for our highly complex testing environment."

"We are very pleased that Sandvine selected the BigIron RX-16 routing switch for the testing and analysis of their broadband equipment," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager for Foundry Networks' High End Systems and Service Providers Business Unit. "Enterprises, like Sandvine, require an advanced and high density future-ready platform to simulate traffic intensive networks, and Foundry delivers this while also providing unmatched performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability at a fraction of the price of alternative offerings."

The BigIron RX family of routing switches is available in three chassis models, each supporting redundant management, redundant switch fabric and redundant power supply components. The BigIron RX-4 is a compact four rack unit (RU) high switch. It supports four half-slot port modules and has a switching capacity of 384 gigabits per second (Gbps). The BigIron RX-8 is seven rack units in height, supports eight half-slot port modules and has a switching capacity of 768 gigabits per second. The BigIron RX-16 is fourteen rack units in height, supports sixteen half-slot port modules, and has a switching capacity of 1.536 terabits per second with 64 ports of wire-speed 10GbE. High performance environments including Internet exchanges and high performance computing installations will be able to take advantage of this massive density and horsepower.-Foundry Networks