Stories by: David Newman

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.

Cisco Systems might be a relative latecomer to 10G Ethernet switching, but it's hardly playing catch-up. Our exclusive lab tests show that new line cards and management modules for Cisco's Catalyst 6500 switches push the performance envelope in a number of ways:

Imagine a technology that authenticates virtually any transaction, enables e-commerce applications and is available to any user, anywhere. Now imagine a technology that can lead to fraud, is expensive to implement and requires serious retooling of enterprise hardware and software to be effective. Which one would you pick?