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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 9, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 23

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Breaking News - Security:

Foundry And Spirent Deliver Powerful Security Demonstration

Foundry Networks Inc, a performance and total solutions leader for end-to-end switching and routing, and Spirent Communications, a worldwide provider of integrated performance analysis and service assurance systems for next-generation network technologies, staged a live demonstration for the rapid detection and isolation of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, at SUPERCOMM, the U.S.' premier communications infrastructure conference held in Atlanta.

Foundry and Spirent showed how service providers and enterprise customers can leverage the ServerIron 400 Web switching system to process more than 1.5 million packets per second, or 1 Gigabit per second of attack traffic while simultaneously processing valid HTTP transaction data. Spirent used its Avalanche and WebSuite solutions on the SmartBits 6000 platform to generate wire-rate DoS attacks in conjunction with realistic Layer 4-7 traffic. The joint demonstration simulated a server farm undergoing a common DoS attack known as a SYN flood. In this type of attack, massive numbers of invalid connection requests are sent to a server, creating a huge backlog that slows server traffic to a crawl and ultimately stops it altogether.

Foundry's new enhancement to its SYN-Guard technology fortifies an extensive package of security management tools within the IronWare security package that complements Foundry ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches. Enterprise and service provider customers rely on ServerIron switches to improve the scalability, availability and manageability of their servers and applications. With the new SYN-Guard enhancement, ServerIron switches protect servers from SYN-attack traffic and pass through only complete and validated connections to servers. The new SYN-Guard enhancement allows ServerIron switches to now defeat more than 2 million packets per second of SYN-attack traffic.

"This SYN-Guard enhancement offers our extensive global customer base a dramatic performance improvement over our prior SYN-Guard offering without adding latency," said Chandra Kopparapu, vice president and general manager of Foundry's Service Provider Business Unit. "The entire ServerIron family of modular and chassis-based systems is designed to provide network managers with effective tools for controlling and managing web traffic. We are pleased to add this strong new protection against DoS attacks to our customers' mission-critical network design options."

Among the companies that rely on Foundry's ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches for traffic management are the Greater London Authority, Munich University of Technology, North American Mortgage Company, America Online, weather.com and Raindance Communications. Foundry is a leader in the market for Layer 4-7 switching, with a more than 20% share in the most recent calendar quarter according to independent research firm the Dell'Oro Group.

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