The new switches are designed to handle an explosion of traffic volume in data centers used by e-commerce and other businesses, brought on as voice, video and data over IP increasingly converge, said Gopola Tumuluri, director of product management at Foundry.

Both new switches are part of the fast-growing market for application acceleration for Layer 4-7 switches, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. He estimated that the market was worth about $700 million globally last year and should grow by as much as 25 percent in 2006. 'There will be a lot of activity in the 4-7 space,' he said. 'It's a hot market now.'

The new ServerIron GT switches are physically smaller than the Foundry ServerIron 450 application acceleration switches Right Media Inc. installed in its four data centers about two years ago, said Matt Phillips, vice president of technology for the New York-based online advertising management provider. The data centers -- and a fifth that's coming online soon -- handle a few hundred servers.

Phillips said he would have used the new GT switches if they had been available two years ago, and he praised Foundry's products and service. 'With every switch manufacturer, there are always problems. But the key difference is how the problems are dealt with, and Foundry has smart guys who always work with us.'

He plans to buy the new SSL acceleration modules to expand the capability of his ServerIron 450 machines, which have already been expanded with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet module.