Stories by: Jim Duffy

Cisco Tuesday announced a major upgrade to its Internet core router, which is designed to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet and support growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services through this decade and beyond.

The Ethernet switch market grew almost 20% sequentially during the fourth quarter, with Cisco, HP and Juniper Networks adding almost $600 million in incremental revenues, according to a recent study by Dell'Oro Group.Cisco's share actually declined for the full year, however, and at a quicker pace than the 1% drop in 2008, according to separate research from investment firm UBS.

Juniper Networks has reportedly agreed to pay $US169 million to settle a 4-year-old lawsuit over backdating stock options, a practice that entrapped and embarrassed many high-tech firms over the past decade.

Bell Canada is claiming the Vancouver 2010 Olympic network as the first IP-based converged network at any Olympic or Paralympic Games.

The two biggest router companies are focusing their attention on mobility this week with products to address operator needs for rich 4G multimedia services.

Cisco is expected to unveil new and enhanced data center products that are designed to more easily interconnect and allocate resources among multiple data centers and are optimized for cloud computing and virtualization.

Combatants in the data center wars keep reloading. This week, two switching vendors -- Extreme Networks and Voltaire -- unveiled Ethernet gear designed to support the growing number of virtual machines moving around data centers, and provide a bridge to legacy environments such as Infiniband.

Juniper and Polycom this week announced an alliance to offer telepresence and video conferencing services to enterprises through service providers.

Analysts are mixed on whether Nortel, the disintegrating telecom titan, will survive in some form or die off, becoming a distant memory of a bygone era and century.

Cisco, HP and others are waging an epic battle to gain control of the data center, but at the same time they are joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers.