NetworkingEssentials

While universities don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networking. Here's a roundup, in no particular order, of some of the most amazing and colorful projects in the works.

Amazingmail.com tossed its Cisco routers, switches and firewalls for Juniper gear and wound up saving enough in ongoing support costs that the project will pay for itself in eight months.

A summary of new offerings to be introduced at the big network industry conference.

Analyst firm Ovum has released its quarterly results for global optical equipment networking vendors with the preliminary indication that the global optical networking (ON) market topped $US3 billion for the seventh consecutive quarter.

Storage networking company Brocade Communications Systems has agreed to acquire enterprise LAN vendor Foundry Networks for approximately US$3 billion, the companies announced Monday.

Nortel is pursuing development of communications-enabled applications, which combine IT and communications in newfangled application types, and would like to see standards set to provide consistent behaviors.

e-DMZ's Password Auto Repository (PAR) is delivered as a hardware appliance with all the services necessary for it to act as a privileged account password manager. All privileged account passwords are issued based on administratively designed rules. The passwords may be deemed valid for an indefinite life, for finite periods of time or for single purpose activities such as installations, upgrades or configuration changes.