Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

Looking ahead to growing demand for bandwidth to feed large companies and computing clouds, Verizon Communications announced steps on Friday to increase the speed of the links its enterprise customers can buy and to make its network connections more resilient.

Using caching technology from Akamai Technologies, Ericsson's Smart Cloud Accelerator, announced Wednesday, is designed to allow operators to improve performance in both fixed and mobile networks.

Cisco this week unveiled an updated line of Ethernet switches for industrial environments, such as manufacturing floors.

Avaya has unveiled low-end Ethernet switches for small and medium-sized enterprises and remote branches that include features usually found in higher-end enterprise-class switches.

We assessed the Arista DCS-7508 with tests of performance and power consumption. The performance tests used the Spirent TestCenter test instrument to measure layer-2 and layer-3 unicast throughput and latency; layer-2 and layer-3 multicast throughput and latency; OSPF equal cost multipath (ECMP); N+1 fabric failover; buffering capacity; OSPF routing capacity; and multi-chassis link aggregation (MLAG). All tests used version 4.8.4 of Arista's EOS software and Version 3.95 of Spirent TestCenter software.

Packing 384 10G Ethernet ports into an 11-rack-unit form factor is only the beginning for Arista Networks' DCS-7508 data center core switch.

The scoop: MIMO MagicTouch 10-inch touch-screen USB monitor, by MIMO Monitors, about $300.

The world is almost out of IP addresses--or at least it's almost out of the IPv4 addresses that IT admins and users are most familiar with. Fortunately, IPv6 has been developed to exponentially expand the pool of available IP addresses while also providing a few other benefits.

Speeding up the delivery of applications and data to remote users is the No. 1 goal of WAN acceleration and optimization. Not only does it help get more done over the same amount of bandwidth -- or less -- but WAN optimization appliances reduce response times and overcome latency inherent to long-distance WAN links. Using a combination of file- and byte-segment caching, TCP optimizations, and application-specific acceleration, WAN acceleration appliances help move the data that drives business.