Aug 11th, 2006 |
As Interop prepares for its second show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York next month, the crew that puts together the massive show network is busy at work. Leading this team is Glenn Evans, the Interop’s lead network engineer who oversees the InteropNet and InteropLabs. This podcast is an interview with Evans at the hotstage warehouse in Belmont, CA, where equipment for the InteropNet and InteropLabs is received, set up, tested, and then shipped out to the convention center. Evans talks about what he’s got planned for the network in New York.
In my final podcast interview at Interop Las Vegas ‘06, I chat with Tom Burns, who’s the senior vice president and general manager of Alcatel’s enterprise network infrastructure group. Last week Alcatel launched the OmniSwitch 6850 family of stackable 10/100/1000/PoE, 10-Gigabit workgroup switches, which are the first Alcatel switches to provide Gigabit power over Ethernet (PoE). Yep, the switch market is getting fairly commoditized, but Burns explains how Alcatel will to try stay ahead of the price-performance curve by adding new functionality like POE and security to its switches.
One of the big fish at Interop, Nortel, is using the show talk about the company’s new Secure Router Portfolio. While this family of routers was announced in late March, it’s a major focus for Nortel at Interop this week. The Secure Router family is a direct result of Nortel’s acquisition of Tasman Networks in December, and contains the 1001, 1002 and 1004 models for small offices and branch deployments, and the 3120 for mid-range deployments. In this interview, Aziz Khadbai (VP and GM of the Converged Data Networks Group) and Bob Reason (Security and Routing Marketing Manager) talk about the new line of routers.
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.
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.
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.
Last, but certainly not least, here’s the final hotstage interview, posted just in the nick of time! 
