Product: Force10 Offers TeraScale E-Series Solution

Force10 Networks, a supplier of switching and routing services, announced new details on the company's TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers, which provides infrastrucutre to support hundreds of thousands of online game players simultaneously, and is used by Sega and NCSoft. "As the availability of affordable broadband connections has driven the proliferation of online gaming portals, gaming companies are faced with the dual challenge of supporting hundreds of thousands of subscribers while providing the same reliability expected from offline console games," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing for Force10 Networks. "By combining leading density and resiliency, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series provides an ideal solution that not only delivers predictable, stable network performance but also enables seamless scalability to accommodate rapid subscriber growth." The company recently announced that it had been tapped by Sega to provide the online infrastructure for some of the company's future online projects. The software publisher uses Force10's TeraScale E-Series as the core router in Sega's network, which serves hundreds of thousands of players through Sega's various online initiatives. The high density and resiliency of the TeraScale E-Series allowed Sega to move from separate networks for each game to a scalable, consolidated network. Additionally, the Layer 2 and Layer 3 support of the TeraScale E-Series enabled the company to both aggregate hundreds of servers and peer directly with service providers in a single network layer. In addition, NCsoft, South Korea's largest online gaming company, built out a gaming infrastructure to support its existing games in the region, as well as a testing bed for developing new ones. The TeraScale E-Series solution allowed the company to build into its online worlds a greater level of flexibility, and provide users with a more interactive gaming experience. The three CPU architecture of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers the reliability and resiliency online gaming companies require to ensure a high quality experience that is akin to that of offline console games. By dividing switching, routing and management functionality between three independent processors, the TeraScale E-Series brings to online gaming networks the fault tolerant infrastructure that can support multiple interactive worlds and millions of users players in multiple online worlds.