Andrew Feldman, VP of marketing at the Milpitas, California-based networking company, said that, while a number of vendors sell 10Gb links that can really only do 3Gb-5Gb, the high end of the new P-Series from Force10, the P10, can execute line-rate 10Gb inspection.
That means it can handle the theoretical maximum number of packets per second defined by the 10Gb spec, namely 14.88 million pps of 64-byte packets, while running the same number of rules and without degradation of performance, he said.
The P10 has two 10Gb ports, giving it an aggregate inspection throughput of 20Gbps, and comes with two GbE ports for logging or mirroring traffic. It has a list price of $95,000. While Force10, as its name suggests, was formed to drive 10Gb networking, the low end of the P-Series is actually a GbE box: the P1, which ships with two GbE ports for traffic and two for logging and mirroring. The list price there is $38,000.
The launch of the P-Series is the result of Force10’s November acquisition of MetaNetworks Inc, another Californian company that was developing high-throughput IDS/IPS and already had customers in the area of high-performance computing, such as research institutes and government institutions.
Feldman said Force10 was launching the new devices with an initial 25 customers, ten of whom are not running our switches, making clear that the company sees the P-Series as a means of penetrating accounts where other vendors like Cisco Systems Inc already have their 10Gb kit.
