Foundry Networks, Inc., a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, announced that The Planet, one of the fastest growing Web hosting companies in the world, has upgraded its network infrastructure with Foundry's new 8-slot high-end IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multi-service routers. The NetIron(r) XMR 8000 is leveraged to aggregate Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) connections from bandwidth providers to The Planet's geographically distributed, world-class data centers, the heart of their business.

Although The Planet's network design is already a generation ahead of competing Web hosting providers, Foundry's advanced IP/MPLS routers offer The Planet the ability to meet the challenging demands of their rapidly expanding business. Purpose built for large-scale Service and Content Provider networks, Foundry's NetIron XMR Series delivers a distinctive combination of full-featured routing, carrier-class reliability, massive scalability, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared with alternative offerings. The Planet's selection of the NetIron XMR series of routers emphasizes their effort to maintain a high-performance and cost-efficient Web hosting network.

"At The Planet, our 22,000 customers host more than 2.8 million web sites, which means network quality and reliability are absolutely essential for running their businesses," said vice president of technology Will Charnock. "Foundry's NetIron XMR provides us with an extremely affordable platform with excellent performance, high 10-Gigabit port density, as well as IPV6 and MPLS support which will enable us to offer future advanced IP services to our customers. Through our partnership with Foundry, we're able to meet the stringent network requirements of our customers across in our six world-class data centers so they can focus on their growing their businesses."

Maximizing performance on aggregation networks is essential to ensure a high-quality experience for end customers. By using Foundry's NetIron series of routers, The Planet extends its superior Quality of Service (QoS) and builds improved resiliency into the network architecture. Featuring Foundry's cutting-edge 5th generation Network Processor based design, the NetIron XMR Series router offers network operators a rich mix of services, including dual stack wire-speed IPv4/IPv6 routing, as well as MPLS Traffic Engineered Tunnels, Virtual Leased Lines (VLL), Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and BGP/MPLS VPN (RFC 2547bis) services. The Foundry architecture enables customers to mix these services on the same platform, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional routers. The NetIron XMR Series is comprised of four system configurations to address the port density and traffic handling capacity needs of different providers.

"Foundry's NetIron XMR delivers industry leading performance while also providing high reliability, scalability, and robust routing protocol support required by large Web hosting providers," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager, high value systems business unit for Foundry Networks. "Web hosting and service providers require a powerful solution for the efficient delivery of multimedia content and large data files; the NetIron XMR Series delivers this while also providing unsurpassed performance, scalability, resiliency, and reliability at a fraction of the price of competing products."