What’s hot?

Today I wanted to highlight a very special Network World publication, that is our annual look at what’s sizzlin’ in the network arena.  Network World’s Buzz issue takes a look a whole slew of up-and-coming issues and technologies, then breaks them down to help you make sense of their impact on your networked world.

One of the more intererting articles takes a look at some upcoming technolgies an asesses their impact.  For example:

* Even Higher Speed Ethernet:  In May, for example, a senior Cisco executive publicly voiced his opinion that 40G bit/sec Ethernet could be technically feasible within two years. Doing 40G Ethernet, based on SONET technology, would be easier than doing the linear mathematical leap to 100G.  Despite the murmurs, no one has yet initiated a “call for interest” (a formal IEEE process to ensure an idea is timely and interesting enough to pursue) on 40G, 100G or any other speed higher than 10G, says Bob Grow, chair of the IEEE 802.3 Working Group and a principal architect at Intel.  Rather, Grow says, recent calls for interest and projects have been focused on getting 10G better tuned to the enterprise market. That includes work on 10G over copper, over FDDI and, more complicated, Ethernet in the first mile, he adds.

* Route Managers: Route management, sometimes called route analytics is not to be confused with the previously buzzy “route optimizers” or “router management” products. Route managers do not log on to or manage routers, nor do they otherwise manipulate the routing function. Rather, these appliances silently “listen” to exchanges between routing protocols and then deliver a Layer 3 map of the routing paths. The map changes as the routes do – meaning, continuously.  Network analysts herald these new products as fantastic planning tools. The real-time visual maps will make it much easier for users to configure, troubleshoot and manage IP networks, they say.

* XML switching appliances: Where there’s a Web service, there ought to be an XML switch. Such is the growing buzz on how to deal with XML traffic. These so-called XML switches work at or near wire speeds to process XML messages, a task that can affect server processing power severely when done in server software. Sitting in front of Web or application servers, these dedicated devices handle tasks such as validating and logging XML traffic, translating XML dialects, prioritizing and routing XML traffic, and encrypting/decrypting data within an XML document.

For more on this article see: https://www.nwfusion.com/buzz/2003/0929signoff.html