By Greg Ferro

If the VMware vFabric speculation is true, then the service focussed data centre designs just got very, very, interesting.

Networking has become “rigid”. Yes I know it’s almost absurd to attribute inflexibility or rigidity to networking. Look what TCP/IP has done for us. There are nearly 2 billion people connected to the internet and according to the Internet World Stats internet user growth rate increased by 380% between 2000-2009. With 2 billion people and growing online, accessing a plethora of applications via a wide range of end-points there is no doubt that the internet and TCP/IP has been a much bigger success than anyone would have imagined back in the early ’90s. [..]

By HP Networking

Riverbed has products on tap that will enable WAN optimization as a cloud service, speed up the boot time for remote virtual desktops and, perhaps in a year or two, a software client that will speed up the performance of handhelds and smartphones.

Two high-profile specifications winding their way through the IETF promise to boost data center switching and service provider routing, but advances from Cisco and Juniper Networks raise questions about how much the specs are even needed.

By Ivan Pepelnjak
As you might have noticed, everyone is talking about Data Centers lately and all the new “revolutionary” networking technologies are targeted at this segment. The reason is simple: server virtualization (not to mention the vapor-word) will forever change the networking landscape and the networking engineers might get badly hurt if caught unprepared.

HP this week unveiled data center switching and security products designed to simplify server connectivity and protect data in a converged infrastructure.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday announced the Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager 6300, a platform to manage all the systems in an enterprise that consume energy, across all the organization's facilities.

It hasn’t been since the mid 1990s that the networking industry was focused on multi-protocol integration or convergence. The industry is gearing up for a major innovation and competitive cycle fueled by the multi-billion dollar addressable market for data center network fabrics. Over the last eighteen months, every major Ethernet infrastructure provider has been talking about two and three tier network fabrics for high-end data centers.

Avaya is prepping to launch its one-box data-center strategy early in October -- the VSP 9000 switch -- as a counter to Cisco's more comprehensive approach.