Routers: All

Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard probably won't force their mutual customers to take sides after the end of their partnership, though the vendors are deadly serious about competing against one another, analysts said on Friday.

Juniper and Polycom this week announced an alliance to offer telepresence and video conferencing services to enterprises through service providers.

Juniper Networks has issued seven security advisories for its products, including a fix for a nasty bug that could be used to crash the company's routers.

Ciena will pay US$769 million for the optical networking and carrier Ethernet assets of Nortel Networks' Metro Ethernet Networks business, the two companies said on Monday.

Federal authorities arrested a husband and wife team for allegedly stealing US$23 million from Cisco in a scheme that had the network giant shipping replacement parts to fake businesses in eight states. The scheme reportedly defrauded Cisco's SMARTnet program. 

Brocade has reportedly put itself up for sale, a development that portends significant consolidation within the data center IT industry.

Cisco Systems has released its twice-yearly set of security patches for its router firmware, fixing 12 security flaws in the products.

Beta testers of a data-loss prevention add-on to Cisco's IronPort security appliances say DLP is looking like a fine complement to existing anti-virus and anti-spam filtering capabilities.

Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday set a course for tighter integration of the two main components of long-haul service-provider networks, saying it will help carriers streamline their infrastructure and run it more efficiently.

3Com plans to integrate intrusion prevention technology from its TippingPoint subsidiary into networking gear from its H3C division as part of a strategy to deliver streamlined secure networks at less cost and power consumption than marquee vendors.