According to Infonetics Research the global Q3 2012 IP router and switch market "roughly reflects economic conditions," dropping by -5% Y-o-Y to reach around $3.4 billion. 

“EMEA posted another negative quarter amid the ongoing fiscal crisis in Europe," the analyst continues. "We may not see much of the usual Q4 budget flush, as it seems just as the European Commission gets closer to economic steadiness, more negative reports arrive.”

Cisco leads the router-only (IP edge and core routers) segment, while Juniper takes the #2 spot from Huawei, who Read more...

Economic weakness persists throughout EMEA during Q3 2012 Gartner reports-- server shipments drop by -2.8% Y-o-Y to reach 590000 units while revenues total $3 billion with a -9% Y-o-Y decline. 

"EMEA remains the weak spot for global server sales,” Gartner remarks. “Each of the 3 EMEA sub regions saw revenue contract: W. Europe by -7.6%, E. Europe by -11.8%, and MEA by -14.%. We’re not seeing signs of demand weakening significantly, but EMEA continues to present a very challenging environment for server vendors to operate in.” Read more...

Google might be (slightly) less secretive about its server halls these days, but we're sure the company never expected this kind of visitor at one of its cooling experiments-- a 1.2m-long alligator! 

The cooling test in question involves the use of a stormwater retention pond at Berkeley County, South Carolina. According to the Post and Courier, the pond filled up with algae, demanding the addition of fish. And that is when the alligator decided to become a Google resident of sorts. 

Now the company has to will call for government assistance should Read more...

The latest AMD weapon in server domination might be less powerful, but is also growing in popularity-- the company will start using ARM designs (in addition to x86 architecture) in data centre processors. 

The first ARM-based AMD server processor, a "highly-integrated, 64-bit multicore System-on-a-Chip (SoC)," will go for cloud and data centre use and should enter production from 2014. It will integrate high-performance fabric in the shape of SeaMicro Freedom Fabric supercompute technology. 

AMD bought microserver (servers using hundreds of "wimpy cores") specialist SeaMicro for $334 million back in March 2012. 

AMD is not the only company working on ARM-based servers-- Dell uses ARM processors in the prototype "Copper" server, HP has Project Moonshot and the Penguin UDX1 carries Calxeda EnergyCore SoC.  Read more...