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.
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Redundant, 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.
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Distributed Forwarding Architecture
—Advanced network
processors, high-performance CPU and high-speed memory
on each interface module provide for a scalable high-performance
architecture
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IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation up to eight links
—Scalable,
cross-module trunking provides for resilient high-capacity
connections between switches.
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Resilient 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.
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BGPv4
—Scalable to 4 million routes, 500 peers and 14,000
attributes with MR2 management module
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OSPF
—Scalable to over 400,000 routes
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IS-IS
—Support for Level 1 and Level 2, includes 25,000 routes
and 512 adjacencies
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Foundry 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.
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Policy-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.
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Comprehensive 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
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VRRP 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.
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Metro 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.
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Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP)
—Supports
sub-second fault detection and fail-over for mesh topologies
in which redundant switches provide back-up operation for
one
another
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Single-instance STP
—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
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Rapid 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
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Purpose-built Feature Set for Demanding Networks
