This is the last newsletter of the year - and that means it's time for the annual glance backward before moving forward into 2009.

As it turns out, we started the year off with a look back, marking the 25th birthday of TCP/IP, a momentous occasion indeed.

But that pause was short-lived. There was too much work to be done, such as advancing to the next higher speeds of Ethernet. The Higher Speed Study Group became the IEEE 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s Ethernet Task Force and started the difficult job of reaching agreements on two standards at once. Research firm CIR predicted that the market for the resulting products would reach $4.3 billion by 2016. And some visionaries were already looking ahead to Terabit Ethernet.

More immediately, manufacturers pushed their 10 Gigabit Ethernet components and adapters pretty hard this year. There is an expectation that this speed of Ethernet will become more widely used, and these companies are stepping up to the plate with their innovations. We'll see what sticks in '09.

Meanwhile, there was a certain rising urgency for converting networks to IPv6, just as there was in 2007. We started to see concrete examples of upgrades to the newer protocol.

Power over Ethernet was standard issue in 2008, and the IEEE advanced its PoE Plus effort to get the wattage up.

But perhaps the most important trend of 2008 was the idea of the data center network, converging storage networking and server networking within data centers. The idea that Ethernet (and at this point, this often means 10 Gigabit Ethernet) would become the unifying fabric here became widely accepted, and rather quickly.

Cisco's data center switch was hailed as a huge development, but the company appeared to take the term "data center networking" to extremes with rumors by the end of the year that Cisco is working on an actual blade server. 

While the industry is trying to make this transition to data center networking, it's also trying to weather the economic storm. Nortel is the biggest networking vendor with the highest-profile problems. Foundry Networks found a buyer before the market tanked. 

What we'll be looking at in 2009 is which companies are able to survive, and then thrive in a new networking landscape where data center networking is the hot thing. Have a great holiday season, and we'll see you again next year.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.