This week: We test Web front-end devices

EDITORS’ CHOICE

NOTE: This Week on NetworkWorld.com is now The Best of Network World. Here is this week’s Editors’ Choice; look for Readers’ Choice later this week.

Page One

Review: Web front-end devices

In the industry’s first comprehensive test of the performance of Web front-end devices, we found the benefits of app acceleration are real, but there’s a trade-off between speed and scalability. We take a look at offerings from Array, Citrix, Crescendo, F5 Networks, Foundry and Juniper.

Nortel road map stresses security

Nortel next month is expected to kick off an aggressive push to revitalize its enterprise switching business with a new endpoint security product, followed by a series of LAN security and resiliency announcements throughout the year. Plus: An exclusive interview with Sanjeev Gupta, director of Nortel’s Ethernet switching business.

Chambers defends Cisco’s wide reach

Cisco is stretched in many directions, with big initiatives in the enterprise, service provider, consumer and small to midsize business markets. Add to this the company’s $7 billion purchase of Scientific-Atlanta, and it’s a plateful. Network World Editorial Director John Gallant and Managing Editor Jim Duffy met with President and CEO John Chambers last week to talk about why Cisco’s reaching so far and how its moves will affect corporate customers.

Video

ITVideo: On the Hot Seat with Geoffrey Moore

Author, investor and industry analyst Geoffrey Moore says organizations need to fight off inertia and continually reinvent themselves to keep from being marginalized. Network World Editorial Director John Gallant interviews Moore in our five-minute video.

Columns

Nutter’s Help Desk: Curing a virus-laden PC

Ron Nutter helps a user whose PC just doesn’t work right anymore.

IT Borderlands: Martin Luther King and the machines

Ken Fasimpaur: “It’s worth remembering that the highest purpose of our technological devices is to serve the needs and desires of individual people. It’s not at its heart to turn a profit, to keep us perpetually employed, or to further the creeping ambitions of our corporate or governmental masters.”

Tech Update

AJAX accelerates Web applications

As IT increases its dependence on Web-based systems to deliver business applications, it sacrifices end-user productivity and real-time updating of information. Web browsers have always been good at delivering software to remote users inexpensively, but they haven’t offered the rich-client functionality of desktop applications. Enter AJAX, a Web development technique that uses tools built into most Web browsers that enable rich-client interactivity and real-time data micro-updates, or incremental updates, without the need for proprietary plug-ins.

News

Campus creates a collaborative IT culture

Peter Murray, CIO for the University of Maryland, Baltimore, tells how he improved collaboration over four years while facing a daunting set of enterprisewide IT projects.

Symantec, Kaspersky criticized for cloaking software

The Windows operating system expert who exposed Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s use of rootkit cloaking techniques last year is now criticizing security vendors Symantec and Kaspersky Lab for shipping software that works in a similar manner.

Linux vendors stepping up their focus on security

Customers should expect to see enhanced, easier-to-use security tools from leading Linux distributors in the coming months as vendors focus on making the platform tough enough to support even the most critical business applications.

Group policy vendors adding better control to their wares

Group policy vendors adding sophistication to management system.

Cisco readies storage switch

Sources say Cisco, which is already among the market leaders in storage switching, is expected to introduce as soon as April a 528-port Fibre Channel device designed to help companies consolidate their storage-area networks and avoid over-subscribing ports on smaller switches.

Microsoft wins over retailer Target

Target to standardize retail stores on Windows, .Net.

EMC girds for grid computing

EMC girds for grid computing with purchase of Acxiom.

But wait, there’s much more!This Week page will also get you to: IETF hums along at 20; Branch nets get integrated help; E-commerce goes contactless; Aruba, Meru air WLAN wares; Banner year expected for convergence; Yahoo, Sheraton offer Wi-Fi lounge; NetPro offers protection for Active Directory; Start-up offers tool for security analysis; More office apps squeezed into USB drives; Military clamping down on security; Military clamping down on security; FDA turns to Verizon for VoIP rollout.

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