Stories about: Tolly Group

"But experts cautioned that the test lacked some real-world conditions . . ."

When we make major infrastructure purchases, we like to know that the choices we've made are smart ones -- good for the long run. But the long run in my headline refers to another issue -- the capability of a device to run for weeks or months without seizing up or experiencing degraded performance or loss of features. It is an issue that seems finally to be getting the recognition it deserves.

When I'm not at the beach, the slower office environment of the Northern Hemisphere's summer is a good time to catch up on industry trends. Over the years, I've been most fascinated by the inexorable "have to happen" trends that never materialize - Open Systems Interconnections is my favourite example. As I catch my breath in our summer break, I wonder if IPv6 might end up in the same category, at least as far as the enterprise is concerned.

For many years, those of us in the analyst community had been talking about the coming migration to VoIP. While we touted the benefits, virtually everyone acknowledged that the price we would pay would be to say goodbye to the vaunted "five nines" of 99.999 percent uptime. But innovations achieved during the current VoIP revolution illustrate that VoIP systems can be demonstrably more survivable and reliable than their predecessors.

One thing is certain in 2006: you'll run out of both time and budget money before you'll run out of new technology to try for your corporate network.

Not satisfied with being the pre-eminent network hardware vendor on the planet, Cisco leaps to the top of the stack with its new Application-Oriented Networking strategy. If the network giant succeeds, competitors might view AON to mean "All Over Now" as Cisco's lock on most corporate networks could turn into a stranglehold.

NetScaler claims to have vastly increased Web speeds with its latest software upgrade. New compression technology comes complete with lab tests, although the results have since been questioned over their flawed methodologies.

The one-time networking giant 3Com is making another assault on the router market.

For network managers who've outfitted their servers with Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards in recent years, the results definitely have been of the "glass half-full" variety. While Gigabit Ethernet NICs have allowed servers to deliver more than predecessor Fast Ethernet, other system bottlenecks usually combined to keep overall throughput half, or less, of Gigabit Ethernet's potential maximum. Will Remote Direct Memory Access-based NICs change all this?

While every enterprise branch office requires LAN and WAN features, an inspection of the communications closet almost always reveals that separate boxes are implemented for each. Adtran Inc is trying to change that.

While every enterprise branch office requires LAN and WAN features, an inspection of the communications closet almost always reveals that separate boxes are implemented for each. Adtran Inc. is trying to change that.