Finally! Interop Las Vegas is just around the corner. The Interop team is excited to see you in person, beginning on May 6 in Las Vegas. Here is a video to get you excited for Interop:
These are the most exciting times that the networking industry has ever seen. I say that because there is fundamental change happening on more dimensions than has ever occurred before. Some of that change is cultural. Employees at most companies are now free to bring their own devices to work and those devices are contributing to a doubling of mobile traffic on a year over year basis. One of the impacts of that cultural change is that IT organizations need to ensure that their networks can provide visibility into the traffic generated by these new devices and in many cases, that they can optimize and control that traffic. Continue Reading »
Apr 24th, 2012 |
Jason QuesadaTwo Weeks until #Interop Las Vegas – Expo Highlights & Sessions Open to All
There is still plenty of time to register for Interop Las Vegas and learn about IT innovations that drive business value:
- See all the latest IT solutions from 350+ leading technology companies.
- Attend 50+ sessions open to all attendees covering the full range of IT issues.
- Hear keynotes from industry leaders.
- Tour the network that powers Interop, built by volunteers with hand selected vendors. Attend classes led by InteropNet engineers. Continue Reading »
Joylyn Tanner – PR Manager here with Interop. I wanted to take a quick second to give a shout-out to the Best of Interop finalists! It’s always exciting to see who is leading the charge in innovation within the business technology market. And it’s exciting that Interop and InformationWeek Reports have joined forces once again to bring you the Best of Interop, which recognizes some of the most innovative technologies in the industry. What’s Best of Interop you say? Well, I’m glad you asked. Best of Interop is a competition amongst Interop exhibitors who submit their products/services for consideration. Based on the products believed to have the greatest potential to impact and advance business technology efficiencies, a judging panel of editors and analysts from InformationWeek Reports select finalists – allowing these companies to tout their prestigious Best of Interop finalist selection throughout the year. I know, that in working with the media leading up to the event, this is certainly an award that garners eyes and attention.
More than 130 companies’ submitted products for consideration but only 24 can be finalists. So, just this week, the finalists across eight different categories were announced and include the below:
Cloud Computing & Virtualization
Cisco – Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 1240
Citrix Systems – Citrix VDI-in-a-Box
Kontiki, Inc. – Kontiki Enterprise Video Platform
Collaboration
Alcatel-Lucent – Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Conversation
Avaya, Inc. – AvayaLive™ Engage
HD Distributing, LLC – SCOPIA XT5000
Data Center & Storage
Ceph Storage, Inc. – Ceph
Panzura – Panzura Quicksilver Global Cloud Storage System v3.0
Riverbed Technology – Granite
Management, Monitoring & Testing
NEC Corporation of America – NEC ProgrammableFlow Controller, PF6800
Net Optics – Spyke
Riverbed Technology – Virtual Cascade Shark
Networking
Gnodal – New GS-Series Switch
Mellanox Technologies – SX1024
PLX Technology – TeraPHY TN8045 10GBASE-T Tranceiver
Performance Optimization
Cisco – AppNav Virtualization Technology
Citrix Systems – Citrix NetScaler 10
Riverbed Technology – Steelhead Cloud Accelerator
Security
Avaya, Inc. – Avaya Identity Engines
ManageEngine – Firewall Analyzer
McAfee – McAfee Network Security XC Cluster
Wireless & Mobility
Broadcom Corp. – BCM43460 – 5G Wifi System-on-Chip (SoC)
Cisco – Aironet 3600 Series Access Point
Cloudpath Networks – XpressConnect Enrollment System
So there you have it! Winners will be announced onsite, May 8th on the show floor. We’d encourage you to stop by their booths and get the inside scoop on the latest innovations that could likely help shape your business technology strategy this year.
Congrats again to all Best of Interop finalists!
Over the past few years, we’ve had a few different names for our Interop track that focuses on communications technologies, applications, and decisions within the enterprise. We’ve gone with simply Communications; Unified Communications (UC), which has become a kind of generic name for this stuff, but one that (as you’ll see) isn’t really the right fit any more; and finally now, Collaboration.
Collaboration is the right name for this track because that’s what we’re trying to enable with communications technology: We’re giving end users the tools to work with each other in whatever medium is either available or preferred—whether that be voice, video, instant messaging, social business tools, or (increasingly) some combination of these. Continue Reading »
By Rainer Enders, CTO at NCP engineering, Inc.
At Interop 2012, I’ll be hosting a session, “Less is More: Why SSL VPN is NOT What You Think It Is” that explores the inherent flaws of SSL VPN. The reality is, SSL has been buoyed by a staggering number of myths and security assurances promised by vendors and assumed as safe by VPN users. But in fact, high profile security breaches have occurred as a result of using key security building blocks of SSL VPN technology. These have included various Certificate Authority (CA) breaches, such as those at ComodoDigiNotar, GlobalSign, Gemnet and KPN.
So, why is this happening? Do users implement the technology incorrectly, or is it simply not as good as all the hype makes it out to be? Is there something else or different we should be doing? What are solutions to the underlying problems?
These are the very questions I’ll answer in this session, drawing upon my 20 years of experience in the networking and security industry. As CTO, Americas for NCP engineering – I’m confronted with examples of SSL misunderstanding and misuse on a daily basis. With this session, I’ll expose SSL VPN security myths and dispel dangerous hype, which is leading to over-reliance on the protocol. I’ll also leverage real-life examples and provide practical ways you can strengthen your remote access connectivity.
Clearly, confusion exists about the security capabilities of SSL. Ultimately, this misinformation undermines the technology and lessens its appeal in scenarios where SSL is an ideal solution. This session will put the most persistent SSL myths to rest and clarify the technology’s capabilities – and its limitations. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.
The session Less is More: Why SSL VPN is NOT What You Think It Is will be held Thursday, May 10, 2012, 11:30am – 12:30pm at Interop 2012.
Apr 9th, 2012 |
John PirontiInformation Risk Management & Security – The widget may not solve the problem – #Interop
Continued and increasing monetary investments in information security technology that are properly implemented and utilized can result in short-term positive returns and assist in effectively addressing tactical technical threats and vulnerabilities as well as meeting compliance requirements. Unfortunately the adversary community is continuously maturing their attack methods and techniques and in many cases is developing technical attacks that can easily bypass or defeat many of the available protection technologies with little difficultly. More importantly though, the majority of the state of the art attacks that continue to successfully cause material business impacts to organizations include a significant element of social engineering or exploitation of trusted individuals as part of their methods. In these cases, technology is limited in its ability to provide protection, and instead the user becomes the greatest source of protection. Continue Reading »
So next week I will be heading down to the annual InteropNet Hot Stage Hootenanny. Hot Stage is the time when all of the InteropNet sponsors convene in a small, hot warehouse to test out all of the equipment and make sure everything plays nice with each other. It is going to be CALIENTE! Continue Reading »
Apr 2nd, 2012 |
Barb GoldwormVirtualization – From the Datacenter to the Desktop to the Cloud – #Interop
Virtualization and cloud computing continue to be top IT priorities for 2012, with increasing adoption and penetration, and yet I continue to be amazed at how much confusion and debate is still occurring within IT organizations around differences between virtualization and cloud. Our most recent research shows over 90% of organizations have adopted server virtualization, and 71% are using, planning or considering private cloud. We estimate that 40-50% of servers have been virtualized, but most organizations are still working to address the pain points of expanding virtualization, and organizations are at varying stages of the road to private cloud. Continue Reading »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from cutting-edge fiction to a marketing cliché. Once derided as an untrustworthy toy for reckless startups, it’s now commonly accepted wisdom that IT should be delivered on demand, as a service.
But most IT professionals haven’t really embraced what IT as a service means. They equate cloud computing with virtual machines, seasoned with a bit of automation and a lot of vendor-driven definition jerrymandering.
Clouds aren’t about machines. At best, a machine is a convenient unit of measure—like a foot, or a knot, or horsepower. It’s an analogy from a soon-to-be-bygone era. No, clouds are services. They’re platforms on which you can stand, foundations to build upon. CIOs who ignore this fact are doing their organizations a huge disservice. By clinging to old models of computing, they’re kneecapping their organizations’ ability to compete.
A decade ago, driven by IT Information Library (ITIL) proponents and the rise of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), everyone claimed to embrace IT as a Service. Few knew what that really meant, other than being nicer to end users, and fewer still actually implemented it.
It took cloud computing—and its ability to sneak past corporate IT’s immune system—for IT as a Service to really penetrate enterprises. For enterprise IT monopolists clinging to their private servers, it’s death by a thousand tiny contracts. Regardless of their resistance, clouds are here to stay, and with them a service-centric architecture. On-demand computing has so insinuated itself into the way we think about building applications that it’s only a matter of time before we embrace clouds almost by accident.
Ultimately, we like clouds because they let us focus on what we’re good at, while delegating the stuff we don’t want. Moving virtual machines around is not a good example of these: it’s not a value-added activity for the business, and it’s better left to the cloud providers. No, we want clouds for what we can build with them, and how easily we can build it.
At a recent cloud event, Google’s Peter Magnussen talked about pipelining. Google converts millions of documents a day from one format to another as part of its Google Docs offering. So when a developer using Google’s App Engine cloud wants to convert a document, should they write the code to do so themselves? Of course not. They should call Google’s document conversion API, because doing so is orders of magnitude more efficient—they piggyback on the highly optimized pipeline of document conversion.
Google doesn’t just convert documents. They authenticate users, rotate pictures, send emails, and do hundreds of other things that developers also want to do. In a cloud, developers call a pipeline the way they used to call a subroutine. In doing so, they stand on the shoulders of giants, and achieve levels of efficiency they could never reach alone.
It’s not just Google. Many other Platform as a Service providers, such as Force.com and Windows Azure, have libraries developers can call that are far faster, cheaper, and more efficient than home-grown routines. Smart architects build atop services like Amazon’s DynamoDB rather than coding their own storage systems. There’s a reason it’s called Amazon Web Services, not Amazon Cloud, after all.
Even if you’re writing on-premise code, spinning a costly function into an elastic cloud is possible. I recently saw a demo by startup Bitdeli, in which a particularly onerous task (such as filtering the Twitter firehose) happens in the cloud, and local code simply calls the result of that task. It’s such a good example of hybrid computing it might even make me rethink my earlier abuse of the “hybrid cloud” moniker.
Make no mistake: Platform as a Service, and replacement of function calls with cloud services, are the arrival of IT as a service. They’re fundamentally changing how we build applications. If private clouds don’t wrap their core compute capability in a rich set of services, then applications built on those clouds will cost more, and take longer to build, than their public-based competitors.
The rest is just Darwinism. This is why, at this year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas, we’ll be focusing on platforms for the first day of the event. Platforms are up the stack—towards services—and into the public cloud, where compute tasks are pooled with others’ to achieve unmatched efficiency.
