Equinix has deployed Force 10's TeraScale E-Series switch/routers in a 10 Gigabit Ethernet upgrade to its Washington, D.C. area Internet Business Exchange (IBX) centre, with planned deployments to IBX centres in the New York, Silicon Valley and Chicago areas by the end of 2005. Equinix operates 15 IBX centres with a total footprint of more than one million square feet in the United States and Asia Pacific.

FiberNet Telecom Group, Inc. a provider of complex metro data services has been selected by Equant to provide low-latency Metro Ethernet Transport services in the New York and New Jersey areas. FiberNet provides securely managed optical Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, switched and dedicated forms of Ethernet connections, and VLAN virtual circuits that can be configured to create point-to-point or multipoint-to-multipoint connections for hub, VLAN or VPN networks. Fibernet's revenues for the second quarter of 2005 were US$8.4 million.

Sun Microsystems is launching its "Galaxy" family of Opteron servers. The systems use AMD's Opteron processors, a selling point that the company will emphasise to differentiate its offerings from competing Opteron servers from IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The Galaxy line is expected to stretch from one-way to eight-way servers, some of which will incorporate the new multiprocessing-capable versions of the dual-core Opteron currently being developed at AMD.

SonicWALL is extending its latest-generation PRO Series appliances with the introduction of the PRO 4100. This new appliance is a 10 port, all-gigabit UTM firewall that delivers high-speed internal and external network protection, promising reduced deployment time, automated ongoing operations and enhanced network reliability.