Networking 2012: Top ten news stories of the year

Some people like reading about fast cars. Our readers like reading about fast switches. Fortunately, switches seem to be getting faster all the time. This year we saw the beginning of a Cisco vs. Arista battle over low-latency switches with the two companies announcing duelling ultra-low latency switches within a week of each other. Arista's ultra-low latency switches use commodity silicon, so they're cheaper yet feature-rich. Nevertheless, Cisco's is still faster. You be the judge of this Cisco vs. Arista smackdown.