force10

Dell this morning announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Force10 Networks, a provider of high-performance datacenter networking solutions.

Force10’s networking capabilities complement Dell’s datacenter solutions portfolio, enabling it to offer customers a broader range of enterprise offerings.

Force10 is a leader in datacenter, service provider, and enterprise networking. It is nearly a $200-million company, based on trailing 12 months revenue, with approximately 80 percent of its business in North America and operating in over 60 countries worldwide.

Force10’s Open Cloud Networking is based on open standards, automation and virtualization, and basically allows customers to transform their network infrastructures into an open, reliable and scalable datacenter and cloud computing fabric.

Much like past acquisitions of Compellent and EqualLogic, Dell says it is committed to maintaining and growing Force10’s channel program.

Force10’s customers include Web companies, Internet portals, carriers, research laboratories and government organizations.

Force10 was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Jose, California, with research and development operations based in Silicon Valley.

Dell says it plans to keep Force10’s existing operations in Chennai, India as it continues to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business.

The transaction was approved by the board of directors of each company. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The transaction remains subject to customary conditions and is expected to close in late summer.

Force10 Networks today introduced the ExaScale E-Series family of switch/routers to meet the requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. As enterprises transition to virtualized data centers and adopt cloud-based services, the network is increasingly required to be more dynamic and responsive to changing resource demands. The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

With support for the industry’s leading line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series reduces capital costs and simplifies management to reduce ongoing operational expenses.

The ExaScale E-Series also extends Force10’s history of enabling cost-effective network ownership with an energy-saving, eco-efficient power and cooling design that provides the industry’s lowest power consumption per line-rate port. Patent-protected advances in backplane and chip design as well as custom designed power components reduce overall system power consumption and lower per port consumption by as much as 70 percent versus comparable competitive platforms.

Enabling Force10’s Virtualization Framework to Fuel Competitive Advantage
The ExaScale E-Series is the foundation for Force10’s Virtualization Framework and provides the multi-terabit platform required to power advanced data centers and cloud computing environments. As budgets have come under pressure, enterprises are turning to virtualization technologies that increase business critical application availability while lowering the total cost of IT infrastructure ownership.

Utilizing the management flexibility of the ExaScale E-Series, Force10’s virtual technology suite, including VirtualScale, VirtualControl and VirtualView, enterprises and service providers can build, manage and monitor network and application performance as well as automate business processes. These technologies enable organizations to build more agile virtualized environments that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements, increasing process efficiencies and fueling a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Force10 Virtualization Framework utilizes open, standards-based data center automation and orchestration technology to promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. By integrating standards-based technology for real-time network traffic analysis and management, enterprises can maximize existing networking resources while building in the flexibility they require to rapidly respond to changing application requirements.

Force10 also partners with leading vendors to provide complete solutions that optimize data center infrastructure. For additional information on the Force10 data center partner ecosystem, please visit the company’s Technology Alliance Partner Program web page, including its computing alliance with IBM.

The ExaScale E-Series delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of up to 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot. Utilizing the capacity of the switching fabric, the ExaScale E-Series delivers continuous non-blocking, line-rate throughput that eliminates network bottlenecks, regardless of packet size or enabled features.

Leading Technology for Next Generation Environments
The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is purpose-built for demanding network environments, including:

Virtualized data center and cloud computing networks with multiple switching or routing domains in local or geographically disparate environments
High-performance computing networks with non-blocking and deterministic management and storage I/O requirements
High-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing in high-performance Layer 2 and IP core or aggregation networks

The ExaScale E-Series also provides the key technologies and functionality to facilitate seamless interoperability for tomorrow’s converged fabric and MPLS-ready networks, including:

IPv4 unicast and multicast routing for advanced services networks
IPv6 ready for native and dual stack next-generation IP networks
MPLS ready with P router and VPN functionality
40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ready

The half-rack Force10 ExaScale E1200i chassis bundle starts at $89,000 and is available today.