Gigabit Ethernet pioneer Foundry Networks Inc is expanding into Europe, and has signed its first European reseller, Inkon AG of Switzerland. The 18 month old company, one of the first to ship Gigabit Ethernet products back in May of this year, plans to launch its second generation of local area networking switches and routers in January next year, which it says will maintain its market lead as competitors launch their first generation systems. In the mean time, the company has updated its current FastIron, NetIron and TurboIron product lines to Release 2.0, adding Layer 3 features such as integrated switch routing, dynamic host configuration and IPX support. It has added support for the Protocol Independent Multcast standard for multicast traffic and added web support to its IronView network managment tool. To protect the early Gigabit adopters, Foundry has pledged to bring its installed equipment into line with the final Gigabit standard if changes are made to the current IEEE draft standard.
