Stories by: David Newman

Ten-gigabit Ethernet was so last year.

High port density, high throughput, and very low latency are bedrock requirements in the data center, and Force10's new S4810 top-of-rack switch delivers on all three counts.

Either because server disks are full or because virtualization is a natural growth path, organizations large and small are moving toward shared storage. For large enterprises, high-capacity storage-area networks make sense, but what about small or mid-sized enterprises new to shared storage?

Building a big data center and looking for a switch to match? How do 256 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and nearly 1.7 terabits of capacity sound?

Cisco take note: Juniper's new EX 4200 switch not only fills a hole in a leading competitor's product line, but also represents a credible alternative for enterprise access switching.

Here are five questions for enterprise network managers to bear in mind when considering UC deployment:

Unified communications offers the potential for anywhere, anytime connectivity between employees and the enterprise. But as the InteropLabs hotstage team found in piecing together more than a dozen commercial and open-source voice, data and messaging platforms, the technology is still at a relatively early stage, and today represents more promise than practice.

Faced with big bandwidth bills every month, it's tempting simply to buy the application with the best performance. Tempting, but not necessarily correct.

Sun has entered the crowded content-switching market with a novel twist: Its Sun Secure Application Switch N2120V lets users define multiple switching and routing domains on a single box.

In an exclusive IDG test, Cisco's Catalyst 4948-10GE delivered record low latency and line-rate throughput. Coupled with innovative security mechanisms and an extensive list of switching and routing features, this switch is outstanding.