Foundry Networks: Company History, 1996 to 2008

01 /Founding and the Iron naming, 1996 to 1998

Foundry Networks was founded in 1996 in California by Bobby R. Johnson Jr., previously chief executive of Network Peripherals, a Fast Ethernet and FDDI vendor. The company reportedly began under a different name and took the Foundry name in 1997. The premise held for twelve years: design switching ASICs in-house, ship Gigabit Ethernet at a lower price per port than the incumbents, and compete on forwarding performance. Every product family carried the Iron suffix.

The first products shipped in 1997 and 1998. FastIron was a workgroup and wiring-closet switch. BigIron was a chassis switch for the campus core and the data centre. ServerIron, launched in the same window, was a Layer 4 switch that grew into the server load balancer covered in the load balancing hub. Foundry was among the first vendors shipping Gigabit Ethernet in volume, before the copper 1000BASE-T standard was ratified in 1999.

02 /The 1999 IPO and the Gigabit Ethernet market

Foundry listed on Nasdaq in September 1999 under the ticker FDRY, at the peak of the Gigabit Ethernet build-out, when campus backbones were leaving FDDI and ATM and hosting providers were adding capacity every quarter. The shares rose sharply on the first day, and the company was already profitable at listing, unusual for a networking IPO of that period. NetIron, introduced around 1999 to 2000, carried the chassis design into service provider routing with BGP and MPLS and became the core router line that Brocade later kept intact.

03 /IronWare and the 2001 JetCore architecture

In 2001 Foundry introduced JetCore, its second generation of in-house ASICs. JetCore added hardware ACLs, rate limiting, sFlow packet sampling and wire-speed Layer 3 forwarding to the BigIron and FastIron chassis without replacing the chassis. sFlow, developed with InMon and published as RFC 3176, became a Foundry signature feature. Across fixed and chassis products the software was IronWare, one operating system with one CLI dialect; the CLI reference covers it.

04 /10 Gigabit Ethernet growth through the 2000s

The growth story of the 2000s was 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Foundry shipped 10GbE modules early, priced them below the market and sold on port density. Around 2003 the company announced that its 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching had been selected for the Red Storm supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories. The BigIron RX and the NetIron MLX and XMR chassis, introduced around 2005 to 2006, pushed 10GbE port counts into the hundreds per chassis and became the Ethernet routing core of Brocade after 2008. Annual revenue reportedly reached around $600 million in 2007.

05 /Japan, competitors and analyst coverage

Japan was a major market. Foundry sold there through several distributors and system integrators, and Japanese carriers, universities and enterprises were among its largest accounts; Japan reportedly contributed a substantial share of revenue in several years. Competition came from Cisco Systems in every segment, Extreme Networks in campus and data centre switching, Nortel in the enterprise and Juniper Networks in service provider routing.

Foundry appeared in Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for campus LAN infrastructure around 2006 to 2008, and promoted reprints of those reports, with a white paper on the advantages of a multi-vendor network, as lead generation downloads on this domain. The PDFs are not hosted here.

06 /The 2008 Brocade acquisition

On July 21, 2008 Brocade Communications Systems announced an agreement to acquire Foundry for about $3 billion. The credit crisis intervened; the terms were renegotiated to about $2.6 billion in cash, shareholders approved, and the deal closed in December 2008. The acquisition page follows the deal and each product line afterwards.

07 /What happened to the domain

The corporate site at www.foundrynet.com went dark after the Brocade integration. Product pages, the documentation tree and the security advisories index moved into Brocade portals or were dropped, and inbound links from vulnerability databases and mailing-list archives began returning errors. The domain later expired and was re-registered. This reference site now occupies it, recovers the most-linked legacy paths as plain explanatory pages, and links onward from the Foundry Networks hub.