Cisco overhauls network equipment

Reacting to a spike in video and data traffic on the Internet, Cisco is introducing a new generation of hardware to help communications carriers cope with the flood, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The networking-equipment giant says its new hardware, the ASR 9000, took four years and $200 million to develop and offers a six-fold leap in capacity over existing products.

The new router is capable of moving 6.4 terabytes per second of traffic, the equivalent of 250 000 digital songs or 200 feature-length movies a second, Cisco says.

Enfora, a supplier of intelligent wireless networking solutions, has introduced its Spider AT Asset Monitoring and Management Platform, which is designed around low power technology, reports Market Watch.

The platform is powered by a long-lasting battery pack, which makes it possible to track and monitor valuable corporate assets, such as trailers, containers or medical equipment, for up to three years.

The Spider AT is an integrated wireless IP platform that combines global wide-area GSM/GPRS wireless connectivity and GPS location capability, allowing the user to retrieve critical information, such as asset movement, based on user-defined alerts, specific events or geofences, while at the same time optimising power management and minimising maintenance.

Meru Networks has brought the techniques of virtualisation to its enterprise wireless LAN products, allowing an optimisation of radio frequency resources that raises WLAN performance and reliability to wireline levels, while reducing the price of wireless networking to a fraction of its wired equivalent, says Wireless Design and Development.

The "virtual port" technology provides every client a device with its own dedicated virtual wireless network.

As with dedicated ports on a wired switch, enterprises gain control over the wireless resources allocated to each client, lowering both initial expenditures and ongoing management costs.