It's not going to be a very merry Christmas for two Kansas men who find themselves on Santa's naughty list (and in court) for allegedly selling counterfeit networking hardware they said was from Cisco.

The two Kansas-area men -- Christopher Myers, 40, and Timothy Weatherly, 27 -- are facing a single count of conspiracy, 30 counts of trafficking in counterfeit goods, and a single count of trafficking counterfeit labels, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.

Legal documents allege that Myers and Weatherly would buy counterfeit Cisco-branded hardware built in China and Hong Kong, slap counterfeit labels on it, and then packet it in counterfeit Cisco boxes. They would even include counterfeit Cisco manuals, according to the Attorney General's Office in Kansas.

The two men may have netted about $1 million from their alleged fraudulent activities. If convicted, they would each face five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the conspiracy charges, and an additional 10 years and $2 million fine on each trafficking count., eWeek.com reports.

While Oracle's been busy trying to win the blessing of the European Union in its attempted takeover deal with Sun Microsystems, Sun has been focusing on upping its storage ante, The company on Tuesday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that purports to double both the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U space.

Sun said it outfitted its Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with four six-core AMD Opteron processors, double the amount of DRAM cache as before (up to 512GB), and new 2TB capacity drives. The end result is significantly improved performance, the company claims.

"Sun server, storage, and networking contniue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe," said John Fowler, executive vice president, System Group, Sun. "Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems."

In addition to storage upgrades, Sun also announced a pair of InfiniBand switches, the Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 and Switch 36.

More details and specs here.

Linux certainly has its advantages, and if Ubuntu 8.04 LTS happens to be your distro of choice, you'll be able to take advantage of Arkeia Software's Network Backup version 8 at no cost, Arkeia announced.

"Arkeia Network Backup is a proven network backup solution with broad platform support and a robust enterprise feature-set," said Steve George, vice president of sales and product management, corporate services at Canonical. "With the Arkeia Network Backup Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu, Arkeia Software makes a significant commitment to the Ubuntu user community and supports Ubuntu’s ongoing growth in the enterprise."

The fully licensed backup solution can be downloaded from the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS repository by using the Synaptic Package Manager or by typing the "apt-get install arkeia" command. The license is not time limited and includes one backup server running on Ubuntu, up to 250GB capacity for backup to disk, support of any single drive, tape, or disk, and 2 client agents to backup different types of client machines, including Windows workstations and desktops, most Linux setups, Mac OS X, and BSD computers.