Network Hardware

Q2 earnings topped the company's projections but Q3 is expected to come in a little lower. Cisco's UCS platform is growing by leaps and bounds.

Juniper Networks is rolling out a portfolio of five routers this week as part of a new end-to-end solution called Universal Access for connecting business, residential and mobile networks. 

HP is taking the bold step of being the first major vendor to offer full commercial support for OpenFlow software defined networking technology.

Catalyst and Nexus switches will now benefit from 40G and 100G Ethernet speeds as well as more ports and virtual networking technology.

Following on the heels of it's 12.3 ADC release that improved IPv6 performance, Brocade is providing more scriptable extensibility via Perl but it staying away from the firewall moniker unlike rival F5.

The big carriers are starting to spend less on networking gear and services and wasn't good for Juniper's Q4 but, for the year, the company came out nine percent ahead.

Like most things, booting up from SAN vs. the server's hard drive does offer many benefits but there are few caveat emptors along the way. But, if managed correctly, they may not be that big a deal.

Data center energy consumption is a hot issues these days and liquid cooling vendors are betting they have the solutions that will cut costs and improve performance and utilization.

Intel is best known in the networking space for its Ethernet networking gear but with the $125M purchase of InfiniBand from QLogic, it's moving to take a place in InfiniBand, too.

Revenues continue to grow at F5, as CEO maps out product plans for 2012. For the quarter, F5 reported Net Revenue of $322.4 million which is a 19.9 percent year-over year gain. Net income was reported at $66.5 million which is a gain over the $55.7 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2011.

After just two and a half years, Cisco's data center server is now generating over $1 billion a year. They now have 10,000 customers generating an annual run rate of $1.1 billion in revenues. On top of that, Cisco has gone from zero to holding down the No. 3 spot globally, ahead of Dell but behind HP and IBM.

Infonetics Research report puts F5 ahead of HP for the No.2 spot, but there is a catch.

Convergence, cost and cloud are driving the design of the next gen data center.

You don't have to automatically buy more capacity to do more work, writes Chuck Tatham of CiRBA.

40 Gigabit Ethernet modules debut as networking vendor accelerates cloud delivery strategy