MANUFACTURING

Enterprises across a range of industries will gain competitive advantages and increase revenue as they leverage cluster computing to change the way they do business, said Force10 Networks CEO Marc Randall today at the Lehman Brothers Semiconductor and Hardware Private Company Conference in San Francisco. At the system level, higher port density and advances in resiliency enable increased network performance with fewer chassis, fundamentally altering the economics of cluster computing. "Taking a lesson from research groups that pioneered cluster computing, enterprises can leverage clustering technology to realize competitive advantages and increase return on investment, essentially transforming the network into a strategic business tool," said Randall during the financial conference that featured the industry's leading private companies. "It is the emergence of high density systems combined with greatly improved resiliency that is making it possible for enterprises for the first time to model cluster computing as a solution for their business." In recent years, cluster computing has replaced mainframes and supercomputers in research networks and national laboratory environments. As enterprises continue to evolve and rely more heavily on their networks to do business, they are turning to cluster computing as both a competitive advantage and a solution. "Many enterprises are moving into a period of network upgrades while also seeking to consolidate the data center, increase application bandwidth and take advantage of low cost blade servers," said Randall. "All of these factors are quickly driving cluster computing into the enterprise, where it offers higher performance networking at a lower total cost of ownership." Many bandwidth-intensive industries, such as oil and gas services, are already benefiting from the economics of clusters. For Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) and Veritas DGC, their networks differentiate the services they can provide to their customers and the speed with which they can provide those services. Cluster computing gives them the flexibility and processing power to ensure they meet their customers' needs while the high density and resiliency of the Force10 E-Series provides the reliable anchor to their clusters. Force10 recently introduced its next-generation family of switch/routers, the TeraScale E-Series, which leads the industry in density, performance and resiliency. The TeraScale E-Series supports 672 line-rate Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis and can process one billion packets per second, the highest in the industry. And, with support for an industry-leading one million access control lists (ACLs), the TeraScale E-Series provides scalable protection against denial of service attacks. According to The Tolly Group, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series is the first Terabit Ethernet switch/router.