David Newman

Ten-gigabit Ethernet was so last year.

Standards-based 40- and 100-gigabit Ethernet switches and routers are starting to show up in enterprise networks, following ratification of the IEEE 802.3ba specification in mid-2010.

If you're considering the move to 40/100gigabit Ethernet, here are five things to keep in mind:

1. Check the cables. Both 40- and 100-gigabit Ethernet use different fiber and copper cabling and transceivers than previous versions. Simply attaching higher-speed devices to an existing cabling plant won't work. On the plus side, moving away from link aggregation toward single higher-speed links may actually reduce cabling requirements.

Buy less equipment, use less power: That's a proposition network managers can get behind, and it's what Cisco promises with the new power management features in its Catalyst 3750-X stackable access switch.

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Building a big data center and looking for a switch to match? How do 256 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and nearly 1.7 terabits of capacity sound?

That's what Cisco is offering with its brand new Nexus 7000 Series data center switches. Intending these boxes to be a data-center mainstay for the next decade, Cisco has constructed the Nexus switches to be far larger than its current high-end offerings.

Cisco take note: Juniper's new EX 4200 switch not only fills a hole in a leading competitor's product line, but also represents a credible alternative for enterprise access switching. 

In Network World's exclusive Clear Choice test, we subjected the EX 4200-48T switch to the same rigorous battery of benchmarks we used to assess seven other vendors' 10G Ethernet access switches earlier this year. (See comparative 10G Ethernet switch test.)