• 10 things you may not know about Ethernet

  Ethernet's value to networking and IT is well established over the past 40 years. But did you know that "Ethernet" refers to two slightly different ways of sending information between endpoints on a LAN? That and some other perhaps lesser known facts about this 40-year-old technology are reviewed here:

• What's next for Ethernet?

  Internet traffic will quadruple in five years and the number of mobile Internet connections will exceed the world's population by 2017, according to Cisco research.

• Netgear to target mid-market with future SDN capability

  While much of the hype for software-defined networking is focused on large-scale data center deployments, some companies are taking a different angle.

• Open Networking Foundation director details SDN directions, OpenDaylight impact

  The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.

• Huawei leans on SAP to give enterprise push a boost

  Huawei Technologies' enterprise division is ramping up its European presence, helped by the announcement this week that SAP has certified the company's servers to run its HANA in-memory platform. Such deals with SAP and other big software vendors will be key for Huawei to succeed in the enterprise.

• Mobile survival guide: Top tips for staying connected

  Picture this: You're sitting down

• Networking gets faster, more media-savvy

  Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

Whitepapers about LAN

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  In Control at Layer 2: A Tectonic Shift in Network Security

  Network hacking and corporate espionage are on the rise and set to intensify. Information security risks remain commonplace, and most organisations need to increase vigilance. This paper has analyses the realistic threats to fibre optic Ethernet networks – both at the LAN and WAN level. Read now.

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  The Network Impact of 802.11n