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Those of you who slaver over the biggest and baddest in networking gear have likely been keeping an eye on the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard. Now that the spec is final, we decided to throw packets at 10 Gigabit boxes to see how they'd perform. We invited Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks, Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Nortel Networks to participate in our tests, but when push came to shove, only Extreme and Foundry came through with products

Although backplane connection limitations hold throughput to 8 Gbps, if you've inundated a gigabit backbone, that's plenty. The sticking point is price--tens of thousands of dollars per connection. Multiple gigabit trunks may do the trick, and if you can wait, prices will drop. But if your critical links are nearing capacity, you'll have to ante up.

Extreme won our Editor's Choice award by a nose, but we were very impressed by both devices and would recommend either. We also give both vendors kudos for stepping up and subjecting their switches to our tests. In that sense, they're both winners.