The rationale, said Steve Garrison, VP of corporate marketing at the San Jose, California-based 10Gb networking vendor, is that until now it has targeted carriers and enterprise data centers, the two areas where the high-speed protocol has already become a requirement.

The question then became how to expand our footprint in the enterprise, he said. We opted to go for the wiring closet, because that’s now the boundary between commodity and mission-critical hardware.

So Force10 has announced two new boxes in its S-Series of stackables. The logic for launching them in that portfolio is that they can be acquired for the wiring closet, then later repurposed for use in the data center. They are:

-the S50V, with 48 GbE ports and four 10GbE uplinks, with the v standing for VoIP, i.e. designed to serve IP phones, and to this end, the device can be PoE enabled for $187 per port, which also makes it suitable for use with wireless APs, and

-the S25, a 24-port box offering GbE or 100Base-FX SFP on the LAN side and, again with the option to have all four uplink ports with 10GbE connectivity.

Both will sell in the $6,000-$8,000 range, said Garrison, adding however that Force10 will compete on functionality rather than on price with the other boxes in the space. The competitors to the S50V are the Catalyst 3560G-48PS and 3750G-48PS from Cisco, the FastIron GS 648P-PoE from Foundry and the Summit X450e from Extreme, and Force10 considers the main differentiators to be fourfold. Firstly, there is the combination of 48 GbE LAN ports with four 10GbE uplink ports, none of the competitors offering this kind of connectivity.

Seccondly, there is the fact that the 10GbE on the uplink ports is optional and thus on a per-port basis, which is not the case with the competitors. The Foundry and Extreme boxes are not stackables, said Garrison, and while the two Cisco devices are, the stacking bandwidth between units is 32Gbps, whereas on the Force10 device it is 96Gbps.

Again in the are of speeds and feeds, the company claims that forwarding for the S50V’s switching/routing functionality is about eight times faster than on the Cisco box, over double that of the Extreme and around 20% faster than the Foundry device.