Foundry Networks introduced a raft of products at the Cebit show in Hanover this week, including technology designed to cut the cost of wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments and Gigabit Ethernet switches for firms with limited rack space.

Foundry said its IronPoint Mobility AP150 and RS4000 access points (APs), together with its IronPoint Wireless Location Manager, enable companies to build WLANs using “single-channel deployment”, which requires fewer APs.

Foundry’s wireless product manager, Mike Hong, said the simplicity of this approach offered huge benefits. He pointed out that any network administrator who has ever had to deploy more than three or four APs “has to manage co-channel interference and associated power levels carefully, or they could bring down the system”.

Hong said the best way to avoid this is not to carefully manage the channels and power, but to have “an architecture that allows firms to deploy APs on the same [wireless] channel and make sure that their ability to transmit and not transmit is tightly managed”.

Hong added: “This is not a new concept. We’re just bringing it into the enterprise wireless world and back-end systems [where wireless controllers] are key to how it works.”

Foundry said the AP150 can support up to 12 users, while the RS4000 is a “mega AP” that can scale to 400 users since it uses two 802.11a and two 802.11b/g radios.

Foundry also released 24- and 48-port Gigabit Ethernet switches. The FastIron LS624 and LS648 are aimed at datacentres and distributed offices where rack space is at a premium, said Foundry’s product marketing director Val Oliva.

The switches each have four gigabit fibre ports supporting both short-range and long-range small form-factor pluggable optics. Both products can also be upgraded to 10 Gigabit Ethernet using 10GbE XFP optics, again supporting short- and long-haul connectivity.

Oliva said the switches’ compact design would be key selling point. “Firms have limited rack space, some of their wiring closets are shallow, and they may still be using Category 3 structured cabling,” he said. “The FastIron LS series supports Category 3 cabling, has a form factor 1U high, but is just 33cm deep.”
The LS624 costs £1,700 + VAT and the LS648 costs £2,550 + VAT.