Hitachi Cable developed its original brand of Ethernet switches APRESIA series in 2003, and has expanded its sales to carrier wide-area Ethernet services and enterprise LAN. APRESIA has been highly regarded for its high reliability and its flexible feature development that consistently meet customers' demands. The enterprise Apresia 13000 series developed under the new BoxCore*5 concept for improving network efficiency by using box switches as core switches has also received high customer satisfaction.

In recent years, for a more efficient core business system operation, there are increasing businesses that construct intra-firm data centers or leverage data centers as a backbone of cloud computing, which is used to provide software and information services via a network. For this reason, the demands for wider broadband networks are increasing at backbone or server access points where traffic gets congested. To meet the demand for such high capacity, IEEE 802 Committee has promoted the standardization of the next generation 40G/100G technology. In addition, as the efficiency of IT investment becomes more important, the need for more cost-effective network equipment also rises.

In the context of such trends, Hitachi Cable developed the world's first 40 gigabit box switches, Apresia 15000-64XL-PSR and Apresia 15000-32XL-PSR.

Apresia 15000-64XL-PSR (hereinafter called 64XL) is a terabit box switch that implements 2 40G uplink ports, and 64 1G/10G SFP/SFP+ ports on a 2U size unit. Apresia15000-32XL-PSR (hereinafter called 32XL) is half the size of 64XL and implements 2 40G uplink ports, and 32 1G/10G SFP/SFP+ ports on a 1U size unit. Switching capacities are 1.28 terabits/second for the 64XL, and 640 gigabits/second for the 32XL. When set to equal capacities, the 64XL and the 32XL are not only space-saving, but also achieve significant cost-savings when compared to the conventional chassis switches. Furthermore, the power consumption of the 64XL and 32XL can be reduced down to 370W and 210W respectively. Both the 64XL and 32XL are designed to be used as data center switches, or network core switches and broadband L2 switches for enterprises and academic institutions. Planned functions specific to data center switches that play an important role in cloud computing include FCoE*6, storage I/O integrated technology, and DCB*7, a new Ethernet technical standard to realize FCoE, and other functions that support virtual server environments. A data center license and L3 license are optional and can be purchased in accordance with the intended use. Without such licenses, both the 64XL and 32XL perform as high-end L2 switches.