After most of the vendors declined our invitation to a WAN shootout last year, we settled for a series of standalone reviews of WAN accelerators this year. As usual, Riverbed’s Steelhead shined -- so did products from Silver Peak, Blue Coat, and Cisco Systems, though they still swam in Steelhead’s wake. Perhaps competition will be stiff enough for a comparative test in 2007. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere on the networking front, Extreme and HP ProCurve scaled our 10 Gig enterprise summit, but Cisco didn’t show up. However, the Cisco Catalyst and Integrated Services Routers did succeed at wowing us in stand-alone reviews.

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