HP executives touted the company's 'converged infrastructure' plan to users at a tech conference this week, but some feared it could led to the much -feared vendor lock-in.

Column about why Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd deserves praise for phasing out 9,000 old jobs and bringing in 6,000 new salespeople to meet the needs of tomorrow.

By Alex WilliamsIn four years, Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will increase fourfold to 767 exabytes, or more than three-quarters of a zettabyte. That is equivalent to 16 billion DVDs; 21 trillion MP3's; or 399 quadrillion text messages. That's the conclusion of Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, a report that demonstrates how data will soon become ubiquitous and why the networking race is becoming one to watch.ng>Discuss

A day after Hewlett-Packard outlined plans to invest $1 billion into its enterprise services unit and cut a net 3,000 jobs, CEO Mark Hurd elaborated on the thinking behind the move, next-gen datacenters and the company's networking prospects.

Hewlett-Packard's plan to cut 9,000 positions while adding 6,000 new ones comes amid a time of shifting IT job skill requirements.

Juniper Networks' announcement this week of switches and routers designed to flatten and simplify legacy networks is the latest sign that this company has no intention of backing off in the face of ever stiffer data center competition from Cisco, HP and others.

During last week’s Cisco Q3 FY10 quarterly financial conference call, John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, said something that impressed and shocked me. The company has been quiet about the growth rates for its Nexus line of data center switches until this call. What shocked me was that the Nexus 7000 is now on an annualized run rate of $1B, yes that’s Billion with a B!

Juniper Networks this week unveiled new switches, routers, software and services designed to help enterprise IT reduce the cost and complexity of data center networking while also improving application and business performance.

By Cisco Systems

By Greg Ferro

You can take the view that Cisco Unified Computing System is a product that is carefully designed so that selling it is as easy as possible. A cynical marketing analysis has produced a product that customers can be convinced to buy. Or is it an innovation in server and data centre design that is desperately needed ?