Intel and Foundry launch ebusiness push

Intel and Foundry have unveiled a range of products aimed at ebusiness data centres.

Intel and Foundry have unveiled a range of products aimed at ebusiness data centres.

Intel has launched three switches that support gigabit ethernet over copper. Peter Horwat, product marketing manager for Lan systems at Intel, said the Intel Netstructure range is focused on providing high availability and fast response times for ebusiness, and forms part of Intel's ebusiness range, which includes server products and consultancy services.

Marshall Eisenberg, director of product marketing at Foundry, said serious data centre switches feature Layer 4-7 awareness and load balancing, and claimed that Intel ebusiness labelling is for marketing purposes. He said the only product that Intel offers data centres is iPivot technology, which offloads SSL transaction processing and performs some load balancing.

One networking reseller said he would use Intel products for low-end portions of a network and bring in Foundry for the core. "The market perception is still that Intel is not a high-end vendor and it is also about 12 months behind switching market leaders such as Extreme and Foundry," he said.

Claus Bjoersten, product marketing manager at Intel, said the important feature of the products is gigabit over copper, which brings down the cost of high-speed networking. "We are coming at the networking market as underdogs, but are very aggressive and want to be seen as strategic partners for ebusiness," he said.

Foundry announced two internet traffic management switches, a high performance Lan backbone routing switch and an internet backbone router featuring optical interfaces. Andy Palmer, managing director of Foundry UK, said he intends to stay out of two-tier distribution and maintain a channel of a small number of dedicated partners. "However, I do expect to sign more former 3Com application service providers, but it's to early to say any more," he said.

Palmer said Foundry will also sign partners that are not traditional network infrastructure specialists, but instead firewall or server-cluster specialists. He said internet traffic management products are not just being bought by service providers for use in data centres. Companies are building their own data centres and there is a market for resellers to supply them.

This article was first published in the issue of 26 April of Computer Reseller News.