Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 2:32 pm by Brady Wilson
Interop ‘07 - Lots of opportunities.
It’s been years since I’ve been to an industry convention like this. I was reminded how big the vendors do things—large booths, gimmicks, booth girls, etc. I do like swag though!
Many of the vendors, and the show in general, seemed to focus more on Corporate IT than on an xSP like us. But that’s not uncommon. A lot of vendors tailor their products to Corporate IT, and we have to find a product that will work in a service provider environment.
I found many vendors offering network monitoring and management software and appliances. This is something we will be looking at in the near future for our own internal network management and compliance needs. It was a good way to get familiar with some of the vendors in that market.
These are the vendors at the show that are now added to the list to research when we get more serious about this type of product:
The U.S. is behind the rest of the world in migrating towards IPv6. There is an opportunity to get ahead and differentiate ourselves by adopting IPv6—lots of opportunity.
- Network Instruments
- NetQoS
- Niksun
- Wild Packets
- ArcSight
- cPackets
- Cymphonix
- Netscout
- Network General
- Solera Networks
I can’t say I learned anything new at the sessions we attended. It really just confirmed what we already know about data center design and the direction we’re already headed. It also made us even more confident in our selection of APC products and the places they are going with them.
It was great to talk with some of our existing vendors: GTA, Ironport and Array Networks were all at the show. The CEOs of GTA and Array Networks were there, so we got to speak with them directly. We talked about their company and let them know how much we support their products. We even gave Ironport some props to a guy who was at their booth researching their products.
The most exciting product I discovered at the show was SolidDNS by a company called InfoWeapons. It is a DNS server software/appliance management by a GUI interface. What’s interesting is that it’s based on their own flavor of FreeBSD called SolidBSD. It uses Bind for its DNS daemon and pf for its local firewall. That’s exactly where I would like to take the opus:interactive DNS platform. In addition, the SolidDNS product is dual-stack, meaning it resolves DNS for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. InfoWeapons also is working on additional dual-stack products like firewalls and IPAM devices.
This kind of kick-started me on the IPv6 idea. The U.S. is behind the rest of the world in migrating towards IPv6. There is an opportunity to get ahead and differentiate ourselves by adopting IPv6—lots of opportunity.
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