Articles by Drew Robb 

Enhanced security, VoIP and video optimization and other features have made the branch router anything but a generic purchase these days. Here's a look at Cisco's proudest products.

With hardware consolidation and sophisticated services placing greater demands on equipment, HP says its branch router line is ready to ride the wave.

Branch routers continue to evolve, adding more and more functionality. Here's how to make sense of this growing networking hardware category.

When you're in the market for an enterprise WAN router, bandwidth isn't your only consideration: security and future network services, like voice, also figure in.

Juniper's Ethernet switch lineup reflects the company's commitment to a "flat" data center fabric.

Networking leader Cisco says two key trends to watch are increasing demand for video and the consumerization of IT, and its Ethernet switch product line reflects that belief.

With the worldwide Ethernet switch market recovering, HP is poised to take advantage with a broad, deep switching portfolio.

Vendors like Cisco, Juniper and HP are piling more and more features into their enterprise switch offerings. Understanding the switch market is key to saving on management, energy and cooling costs.

RedSeal Systems says you're probably spending more of your budget on network-layer security, even as 70 percent of the threats you face come in at the application layer.

Netuitive says its predictive algorithms will provide enterprise network managers with the ability to make better decisions.

When you're determining your NMS needs, steer between over-complex projects that rely on a heavy dollop of DIY scripting and over-priced systems that can't live up to their promises (or expense).

After spending the past year telling the rest of us to go virtual, Cisco is practicing what it preaches in 50 of its own data centers.

With vCloud Director, VMware aims to pool virtual infrastructure resources within an existing datacenter and deliver them to users over a private cloud.

Fujitsu says it plans to "virtualize everything feasible," and to that end it has put together a mix of familiar Cisco interfaces and VMWare technology for virtualized data centers.

Early adopters say Cisco's Nexus 1000V Series switches are helping them break down silos in IT, making it easier to deploy virtualized systems to customers more quickly.

With open source software carving out territory on servers, desktops and mobile devices, will Cisco yield its market dominance to open source routers?

If the World Cup taught network administrators anything, it's that the demand for video is maxing out bandwidth, leaving them scrambling to better manage resources.

As your network grows, your organization changes or new technologies come and go, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with what's running on your infrastructure. You should rein in "the lost network" with a combination of Layer 2 and 3 discovery tools.

Even though the economic downturn has slowed enterprise spending, government-driven wireless sales have kept the Wi-FI infrastructure market on track for $7 billion in sales by 2014.

With hundreds of thousands of passengers a day and thousands of end points to serve its system, the Denver Regional Transportation District had a challenge on its hands when it went virtual on its sprawling network.

Virtualization is great for "hiding the plumbing," but when you do want to see what is happening underneath, the same old tools won't do the trick.

When international law firm Troutman Sanders realized it wasn't getting the best information from its network, it turned to NetFlow and Scrutinizer from Plixer International.

Whether it's from an acquisition or organizational change, if you're ever in the position of integrating two networks remember that the cultural factors can matter as much as the technical ones.

Netflow has changed since Cisco first introduced it. To get the maximum security benefit from this useful protocol, make sure collectors operating on your network are able to collect, analyze and store Flexible NetFlow templates and data.

Some say fragmentation introduces serious performance bottlenecks, others disagree, and everyone seems to have a strong opinion.