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INTEROP LOCATIONS: LAS VEGAS • TOKYO • MUMBAI • NEW YORK |
Here’s an interview I did today with Mahboud Zabetian, the President and CEO of WildPackets. This week at Interop, WildPackets is doing the first public demos of its Omni Distributed Network Analysis Platform 4, which has built-in analysis for VoIP, application monitoring, and network forensics. Zabetian explained to me how the product can help optimize network services and maximize the uptime for enterprise networks.
Here’s the podcast…
This week at Interop, BlueCat Networks is launching the Proteus Enterprise Internet Protocol Address Management appliance, which helps companies manage their growing numbers of IP addresses. Growth in applications like VoIP, Internet-based video conferencing, and mobile and wireless technology require the allocation of more and more IP addresses, and when you combine that with the evolution from IPv4 to IPv6, it will be increasingly challenging for to effectively manage IP-based networks. In this interview with Michael Hyatt (CEO) and Richard Hyatt (CTO) of BlueCat, they talk about the Proteus and how IP address management and what it’s designed to do.
Here’s the podcast…
This year the InteropNET is using the Coyote Point E450i layer 4/7 service balancing device to leverage NOC services over multiple servers. However load balancing is only a portion of what the Coyotes are doing.
At the heart of the problem, load balancers have been around for a while and the concept while simple, somehow has become counter intuitive for some sysadmins. The gist is this, the load balancer would have its public interface sitting in the DMZ of your firewall with a static IP address assigned as the DNS entry for www.company.com and as such also has the single SSL encryption certificate assigned to it. (not all load balancers can do this, but Coyote Point can) Then when a web request comes in, the E450i will take the request and use an “adaptive” load balancing methodology to split up the web requests across a collection of web servers behind the load balancer. Thusly instead of having to buy increasingly larger web servers, you split the load across multiple machines, that also has two BIG added benefits: (1) allow you to continue using legacy web servers with weights assigned to them on how much of the load should be assigned to them, and (2) increased service windows. The idea being that you can take down a server for maintenance and have the load balancer shift the load to the remaining servers.
However, the story doesn’t end here. The Coyote Point product line also allows you to SSL enable older legacy apps through its SSL acceleration feature. Here the added benefit is that you only purchase a single SSL cert, instead of one for each server. Here the Coyote Point box unwraps the SSL traffic from the web and sends it along to your non-SSL webservers, but behind the protection of your firewall. New to the InteropNET is a beta daughter card to provide application acceleration through advanced compression algorhythms. The application that really benefits is email with the InteropNET MTA’s handling in excess of 1000email/hour.
See the E450i in NOC3 (next to Aruba Networks) and also in the Coyote Point booth #655 for their entire line of application accelerators and load balancers.
Brian Chee is a Senior Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine and is the Director of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology.
Here’s an interview with Dr. Michelle Blank, Radware’s Chief Marketing Officer. Blank talks about her company’s new application acceleration and carrier-grade perimeter security products that Radware is launching here at Interop this week. Blank explains how the products help network administrators optimize their network traffic and enhance security.
Here’s the podcast…
As mentioned last night, Brian “Skipper” Chee was leading the final Tuesday tour. He was due to be at the Labs at 4, after spending 30 minutes showing the tour participants the various InteropNet sights. I kept watching for him…
…and a bit after 5pm (when the show closed for the day!), he walked up with a few weary attendees and a couple of additional InteropNet team members. After castigating him for the “three hour tour” (OK, so it was only an hour and a half, but you get the point!), we were able to give the attendees a brief tour of the InteropLabs, even as the lights dimmed for the evening.
Given that we have three technology areas here in the Labs, there is a lot to see. We also create demonstrations that you can actually play with yourself. Where else can you get your hands on standards-based Voice-over-IP phones interoperating across firewalls and SSL, Open Source systems that are integrated to demonstrate how the technology can be used to run the services of an enterprise, and also compare and contrast the three leading approaches to Network Access Control (Cisco’s NAC, Microsoft’s NAP (running on Vista clients and Longhorn server), and the emerging standards-based Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect)?
So, pick an InteropNet tour today or tomorrow, join up with one of the InteropNet NOC Team members, learn how the network works on the show floor, and end your tour here at the InteropLabs where you can get hands-on with these technologies.
…and if you get “Skipper”, tell him I sent you… 
Well, if Brian’s going to lead the next tour, I’d better get this written before they get here to the InteropLabs and I step out of the green room to give the crew a verbal tour of our area.
It’s booth crawl time, with a number of the booths on the floor offering food and drink to the attendees who are spending time here today. It’s a great opportunity to see who is doing what and to wander the floor during a more relaxed time.
The show opened with a bang this morning, with a typical Las Vegas cover band slamming out hard-core headbanger tunes–to the dismay of nearby booths. They were close enough to us that I was wondering just exactly how we were going to talk over them, since we’re low-tech in the AV department, and can’t compete with their sound-reinforcement. But, they have sinced toned it down.
Of course, Kevin didn’t like the low-tech look, so he pushed through and built a Flash presentation for us, so you can now get a clearer picture of the NAC Interop Labs initiative by watching the plasma at the front of the NAC table.
The good news for us is that everything is working, the class (free to all attendees) has been well-attended and interesting, and those who make their way here to the labs are very complimentary about what they are able to learn–with one attendee going so far as to say that it’s his favorite part of the show (of course, he didn’t get to see Brian and Kathy reaffirm their vows).
Drop by and see us. Get your hands on the machines. Try to break the demos if you want. But, don’t let this opportunity go by without actually getting your hands onto the NAC technologies that are out there.
In this interview I chat with Neil Lieberman, the VP of Global Marketing for Interwise. Interwise is launching version 7 of Interwise Connect, an IP-based conferencing application for audio conferences, Web meetings, virtual classes, webcasts, broadcasts and on-demand recordings. Web conferencing can be an important component of corporate business continuity plans in the face of a large-scale disaster like hurricane Katrina or a global flu pandemic, where employees cannot come to work. In these cases, a rich communications tool can keep employees connected and productive, as Lieberman explains.
Here’s the podcast…
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Well it’s been a long haul, but the show floor is a buzz and the marketing folks are pulling out the stops to lure attendees into the booth…we’ve already had two InteropNET tours and I need to post before I lead the 3:30pm tour today…if you want a behind the scenes look at the InteropNET and get some stories about it, signup as soon as possible since slots are filling up fast…
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Brian Chee is a Senior Contributing Editor for InfoWorld Magazine and is the Director of the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology.
Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, gave the opening keynote this morning, kicking things off just prior to the opening of the expo floor. At its core, Chambers’ topic was a familiar one, if you’ve seen him speak before: “the network is the platform”. For this particular speech, Chambers honed in on promise of the “network quadplay”: data, voice, video and wireless over the network, and how that will transform not only businesses, but our lives as consumers, too.
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In about 10 hours the show floor opens and half the team is still here. I guess it’s a good idea to get some sleep soon, before the show begins. The booth has been cleaned up, the signage is all in place and Chris’ web pages for the different apps we’re showing are starting to look really good. The cerebrum workstation is ready to register users and the printer has paper and is ready to print out the user information.
Today everybody has worked really hard on finishing up the critical parts of the demo, and things are starting to look good. Of course we have had some instabilities as is expected on the last day before the show starts, but all in all we’re pretty excited about showing the stuff we’ve been working on to anybody who might find us tomorrow.
Of course we will continue testing interesting apps all through the week, and also make an attempt to do some serious work on documenting what we have tested, what is working, what is not working and whatever interesting bugs and workarounds we have found.
Well, I think it’s time to head out, hope to see a lot of people in the ilabs booth tomorrow!
Interop Tweets
May 3rd, 2006 |
