As artificial intelligence (AI) grew in popularity this year, the networking systems that connect AI applications and workloads also saw elevated interest from technology leaders and buyers.

SDxCentral readers were most drawn to our coverage of Cloudflare’s networking backbone, the resilience of MPLS and networking giant Broadcom’s drawn-out acquisition of VMware. Honorable mentions include the future of Ethernet for AI networking and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s deal to acquire Athonet.

With 2024 around the corner, here is a recap of our most popular networking coverage from the year, based on aggregate page views.

The vendor, known for its content delivery network (CDN) and diverse security services, claims it operates in 300 cities worldwide, interconnecting with over 12,500 networks, including major internet and cloud service providers and enterprises.

To support this expansive global network, Cloudflare has established a large network of dedicated backbone connections, using both the public internet and private fiber optics to achieve reliable connectivity between different points across the world.

Despite the hype generated by SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE), MPLS remains a top enterprise WAN option. According to the research firm IMARC Group, the worldwide managed MPLS market hit $60 billion in 2022 and is forecast to grow to $80.6 billion by 2028. SD-WAN, in contrast, was a fraction of the size of MPLS in 2022, reaching only $4 billion, according to Global Market Insights.

The vendors that offer newer, cloud-based WAN services often deride MPLS’s drawbacks, most notably its cost and complexity, but if the critiques of SD-WAN/SASE vendors are accurate, why is MPLS still such a force in the WAN market?

Networking giant Broadcom released a statement admitting that its deal to acquire VMware was not going to hit its long-standing deadline of before the end of the vendor’s third-fiscal quarter, which was October 31. Instead, the deal was slated to close “prior to the expiration of their merger agreement,” which was November 26.

In an October 30th statement, Broadcom again stated the laundry list of countries and regions that had at that time legally approved the deal, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union (EU), Israel, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. It also stated the deal had received “foreign investment control clearance in all necessary jurisdictions,” and that “there is no legal impediment to closing under U.S. merger regulations.”

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan took to the stage during November’s VMware Explore Barcelona event in an attempt to sooth potential concerns from VMware customers that his company’s pending acquisition would not follow Broadcom’s historical model.

Tan told attendees during a brief keynote address that he had learned a lot from talking to VMware customers and partners over the past 18 months and stated three “commitments we will make to you, our customers.”

The first was that the semiconductor, infrastructure and network giant will “accelerate the pace of innovation” through increased research and development investments. Tan wrote in a blog post earlier this year that Broadcom planned to invest an incremental $2 billion per year in VMware, with half of that investment focused on R&D.

The long and winding path that networking vendor Riverbed has been on over the past two decades took another turn in June.

On May 30, private equity firm Vector Capital announced that it was acquiring Riverbed. Financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. According to a Bloomberg report, the deal was estimated to be worth approximately $450 million.

The new ownership is just the latest step in the saga of Riverbed’s ownership as the company has bounced around the tides of market conditions during its two decades of existence.

Make no mistake about it, Ethernet in 2023 was the foundation of all modern networking and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

At the 2023 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC) in San Diego, the Ethernet Alliance had a multivendor interoperability demonstration highlighting the capabilities of the modern specification spanning from 10-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) to 800 GbE. The interoperability demonstration included technologies from 18 different vendors showing how Ethernet technologies work across different hardware solutions.

For decades, the virtual private network, more commonly known by the acronym VPN, has been a mainstay of enabling secure remote connectivity.

With a VPN, a secured, encrypted tunnel, enabled either via SSL-VPN or IPsec, is created between the user and the enterprise. Once connected, the user then gets the same access as they would if they were physically present within the organization’s own LAN. In the modern era, many organizations have recognized that VPN alone is not enough to secure access, as threats can come from both outside and inside of a network perimeter. That realization has in part led to the growth of the zero-trust network access (ZTNA) approach.

With ZTNA, access and authorization to applications is always being validated in a model where there is no inherent – or implied – trust.

Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware had gained significant regulatory momentum by the end of October. But questions remained at the time over how Broadcom would drive a return out of a business that it readily admitted was losing market share to public cloud hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Once approved, the deal was expected to cost Broadcom a not-insubstantial $69 billion. That was a significant sum for VMware that in its previous quarterly earnings release had posted a profit of $224 million.

In response to the escalating bandwidth requirements of the modern campus amid the return-to-office (RTO) trend, Fortinet introduced its new FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 campus switches, integrating with the vendor’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security and networking services.

“The hybrid workforce remains strong, but as we are seeing more and more workers coming back to the campus when you look at the large organization, the bandwidth requirement for the large campus is also going high,” Nirav Shah, VP of products and solutions at Fortinet.

To address the demand, Fortinet added a new multigigabit secure campus access switch — the FortiSwitch 600 series — to its portfolio, boasting up to 5GE access and 25GE uplinks for better network performance and next-generation wireless access points support.

In April 2022, AMD plunked down $1.9 billion to acquire privately held data processing unit (DPU) vendor Pensando. A year later, what has AMD been doing with Pensando and is its big bet paying off?

To answer that question, SDxCentral talked to Soni Jiandani, corporate VP of the networking solutions group at AMD. Jiandani was part of the team of ex-Cisco employees that started Pensando in 2019. She noted that over the past year, the Pensando business unit within AMD had grown, advancing the way that DPU technology can be integrated into smart switches and infrastructure acceleration systems.