Information Engineer

Attendance is down at this year’s Interop. I’ve heard about companies issuing travel bans on employees and vendors pulling out at the last minute due to budget constraints. Nevertheless, the networking industry is making the best out of it. Some of the early highlights for me include:

1. Switching, switching, and more switching

Extreme kicked off the proceedings on Monday with a new 10-Gigabit stackable data center switch built to scale to 40/100 Gig in the future. Nice device that set the tone for Interop 2008. On the show floor, start-up Arastra received its fair share of Vegas buzz. The company was founded by former Sun Microsystems bigwig Andy Bechtolsheim, but the real story here is that Arastra is pushing the 10-Gigabit Ethernet performance limit with prices at around $500 per port. It will be tough for old Andy to crack this market with the big boys, but this is pretty impressive.

2. Don’t forget Cisco

Is Cisco Systems vulnerable in the data center switching or other networking spaces? Probably not. Jayshree Ulall’s team won the “best of Interop” award for Cisco’s new Nexus data center switches and picked up another award for application acceleration.

3. Virtualization

I am intrigued by Citrix’s strategy that blends server/desktop virtualization with its leading XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and NetScaler application acceleration portfolios. Citrix is thinking about virtualization, asset optimization, and traffic management from end-to-end. This is where the industry is headed; Citrix has a pretty good idea of how to get there.

4. Nortel gets the Interop Chutzpah award

Nortel is on the offensive and its target is–obviously–Cisco. Nortel announced 60 companies that chose Nortel over Cisco, a pretty bold gesture. Nortel is also featuring an “energy calculator” at its booth where users can enter a Cisco and Nortel configuration and get data on power consumption comparisons. No gimmicky booth babes or give-aways, just “go for the throat” guerilla marketing.

Also on tap Wednesday: more virtualization and wireless networking–should be fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 7:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.