Foundry Networks Product Archive

05 /Contents

• 01Foundry Networks: Company History, 1996 to 2008Guide

  Foundry Networks built Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, routers and load balancers from 1996 until Brocade acquired it in December 2008. This page records the timeline and the product families.

• 02Brocade Foundry Acquisition: Timeline, Renames and SuccessorsGuide

  Brocade Communications Systems announced the purchase of Foundry Networks in July 2008 and closed it that December after cutting the price. This page follows the deal, the renames and the successors.

• 03Foundry Networks Security Advisories Archive (bugTraq)Guide

  The old Foundry site kept its advisories at bugTraq.html, a page cited by vulnerability databases for years. This page records the advisory classes that affected IronWare devices and how to harden one today.

• 04Foundry IronWare CLI Command Reference and Cheat SheetHow-to

  IronWare used one CLI dialect across Foundry switches, routers and ServerIron load balancers. This page is a cheat sheet for that dialect and a map of where the documentation went.

• 05Foundry Switch Default IP, Console Access and Password RecoveryHow-to

  Foundry switches shipped without an IP address. First contact is the serial console, and lost passwords are cleared from the boot monitor. This page gives the settings and the procedure.

• 06IronView Network Manager: Foundry SNMP Management PlatformGuide

  IronView Network Manager was the SNMP-based management application Foundry sold for IronWare devices. This page describes what it did, where it stopped, and the generic tools that replace it.

• 07Foundry ServerIron: Layer 4-7 Switch and Load Balancer FamilyGuide

  ServerIron was the Foundry Networks Layer 4 through 7 switch line: a load balancer built into an Ethernet switch, sold from around 1998 until the Brocade acquisition and continued as the ServerIron ADX.

• 08Foundry BigIron: Layer 3 Backbone Switch FamilyGuide

  BigIron was the Foundry Networks chassis switch line for campus and data-center backbones: wire-speed Layer 2/3 forwarding, redundant management and hot-swappable line cards, from the late 1990s through the BigIron RX.

• 09Foundry FastIron: Layer 2/3 Edge and Wiring Closet SwitchesGuide

  FastIron was the Foundry Networks access and wiring closet family, from the late 1990s FastIron Workgroup to the PoE stackables of 2007. The software name survives today on Ruckus ICX switches.

• 10Foundry NetIron: Core and Service Provider Router FamilyGuide

  NetIron was the Foundry Networks router line for ISPs, exchange points and large campuses, from the NetIron 400 and 800 of 1999 to the XMR and MLX chassis that Brocade and later Extreme Networks kept selling.

• 11Foundry EdgeIron: Entry-Level Managed Edge SwitchesGuide

  EdgeIron was the Foundry Networks budget line of managed edge switches, sold from around 2002 with a CLI and web interface unrelated to IronWare. Its user guide PDFs remain some of the most linked documents on this domain.

• 12Foundry SecureIron: Security Switch and Firewall Load BalancerGuide

  SecureIron was a mid-2000s Foundry Networks product that put stateful access control, denial of service protection and firewall load balancing into a switch aimed at the perimeter and data-center edge. It did not survive the Brocade acquisition as a line.

• 13Foundry IronPoint: Enterprise Wi-Fi Access Points and Wireless SolutionsGuide

  IronPoint was the Foundry Networks enterprise wireless line, built around the IronPoint 200 access point of about 2004 and managed from FastIron Edge switches. It was a minor entry in the WLAN market and is obsolete today.

• 14Foundry AccessIron: Access Routers for Branch and WAN EdgeGuide

  AccessIron was a short-lived Foundry Networks attempt at branch and WAN edge routing in the early 2000s, extending the IronWare CLI to T1/E1 and serial interfaces. It is remembered mostly for the command reference PDF hosted under its documentation path.

05.1 /Orientation

Foundry Networks was founded in 1996 in California and sold Ethernet switches, routers and Layer 4-7 load balancers to enterprises, universities, internet exchanges and service providers until Brocade acquired it in December 2008. Its products were named for iron: BigIron backbone switches, FastIron edge switches, NetIron routers, ServerIron load balancers, EdgeIron value switches, SecureIron security switches, IronPoint wireless, AccessIron branch routers, all managed by the IronWare operating system and the IronView Network Manager. A remarkable amount of this equipment is still powered on in labs, schools and small networks, and the software name FastIron survives on switches sold today by a successor brand.

The archive begins with two narrative pages: the company history from founding through the 1999 IPO to the 2008 deal, and the Brocade acquisition, which follows each product line through the 2017 split of Brocade's Ethernet business to Extreme Networks and to Ruckus. Nine product family profiles follow, one per line, each describing what the family was, its generations, what replaced it and what it is good for today. Three practical pages close the section: the security advisories archive that replaces the old bugTraq listing, the IronWare CLI reference, and default IP and password recovery.

Why keep an archive of a company that has been gone for nearly two decades? Because the links never died. The original foundrynet.com documentation was cited by university IT departments, vulnerability databases, operator mailing lists and encyclopedias, and those citations still point here. Someone who follows a 2004 footnote deserves a page about the thing the footnote described, written honestly, rather than a parked domain or a casino landing page, both of which occupied this address in the years between.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Foundry Networks, Brocade, Broadcom, Extreme Networks or Ruckus/CommScope, and it does not host any of their documents. Product names are used to identify the products. Dates are hedged where the public record is thin, specifications are given qualitatively unless a primary source was available, and every page lists its sources. Corrections are welcome through the contact page and are applied with a dated note.

If you are running Foundry or Brocade-era hardware today, read the pages in this order: security advisories (what you are exposed to and how to harden it), CLI reference (how to look around), default IP and password recovery (how to get in), then the profile for your product family. The technology guides in the other four sections explain what the features do; the archive explains what the boxes are.