NETWORKING

RUCKUS ICX 7850

WINNER: OVERALL 

With the ICX 7850 switch line, Ruckus Networks, now part of CommScope, is bringing more Gigabit throughput from the core to the edge of the network. The Ruckus ICX 7850 switches provide highdensity aggregation with up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet as businesses continue their multi-Gigabit network growth. The ICX 7850 offers advanced stacking—with the option to scale up to 12 switches—as well as an available SmartZone network controller that provides configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. The high-performance ICX 7850 line can also use existing fiber and network infrastructure that a business might have in place, for a simple upgrade to the enterprise edge network.

Subcategory Winner—Customer Demand: HPE Aruba 8400

Along with offering massive performance, the HPE Aruba 8400 core switch stands out by running the AOS-CX operating system— a programmable, cloud-native OS with numerous benefits for customers. Those include the ability to automate many network functions, while also gaining actionable insight from the network and proactively remediating network issues.

Finalist: Cisco Catalyst 9600

Following the retirement of the hugely popular Catalyst 6000 series switches, Cisco debuted the Catalyst 9600 core switch family as a successor that is primed for Cisco’s intent-based networking push. The Catalyst 9600 switches enable up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet and feature full-stack programmability to provide future updates without new hardware.

Finalist: Extreme Networks: ExtremeMobility 500 Series

Aimed at providing strong connectivity in dense environments, Extreme Networks this year launched its ExtremeMobility 500 series of 802.11ax access points. Key capabilities of the ExtremeMobility 500 access points include four times greater capacity to enable improved scaling of customer networks.

Finalist: Juniper MX2020 5G

With the MX2020 5G Universal Routing Platform, Juniper Networks provides massive performance and density across edge, core and converged applications. The router offers 80 TBps of system capacity while enabling 100 Gigabit, 200 Gigabit and 400 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities.