Cisco, which has been having trouble moving its switches up against competition from HP and Juniper et al, updated the Catalyst 6500 Tuesday, its most popular product even, generator of some $42 billion in revenue the last 12 years with 700,000 installations out there somewhere, a seeming indication that it had gotten some focus back on its most important business.

The widgetry promises to let users plug the upgrade into existing chasses.

Meanwhile, HP claims market share gains in networking at Cisco's expense. Cisco's switching business was down 9% in the April quarter to $3.3 billion and, although it continues to dominate, it's supposed to have lost five points of share in the 12 months between 1Q10 and 1Q11.

HP reportedly gained half of that with cheaper systems.

The new Catalyst 6500 typically costs about $81,000 and is supposed have four times the performance of a comparable $81,000 HP system.

Its throughput has been increased from 720 Gbps to 2 Tbps, a threefold increase and it can handle four times the number of devices, or something like 10,000 mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Cisco claims it's gotten 5,400 customers for its soup-to-nuts servers - the things that got HP so ticked off - and it's adding 1,000 a quarter, giving it about 10% of the blade market according to IDC, putting it right behind HP in the US, with 19.7% market share.