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2011 Winners | 2011 Finalists

The 2011 Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner:

Winners in each category:

Well, the votes are in and once again we're pleased to bring you the top new products that appeared at Interop 2011 Las Vegas. Every year, my fellow judges and I are delighted to be able to review and compare some of the hottest technology available, and this year was no exception. This year we had 135 qualified entries for Best of Interop, and in reviewing the nominees this year the trend seems to be a focus on a number of great products to allocate, secure, manage, and improve the performance of what's becoming an increasingly extended IT environment. In previous years, the emphasis was on providing many of the underlying technologies for virtualized and cloud resources, but for 2011 a number of the contenders for Best of Interop are looking at ways to provide better visibility and control of these distributed types of services. Recent headlines about service outages in the cloud just reinforce the need for products and services that not only enable the use of distributed resources, but protect and provide contingencies for cloud workload interruptions; whether they are internal or external to your enterprise. -- Steven Hill -- Lead Judge, Best of Interop 2011

Best of Interop (Overall) and Cloud Computing & Virtualization Category Winner

VMware -- VMware vCenter Operations Standard 1.0

Judges: Charles Babcock & Jonathan Feldman

VMware's vCenter Operations is another one of those products where you can see an ambitious company testing the limits of what can be done from an existing position of strength. It is a bold effort to combine the data center disciplines of system configuration, performance management, and capacity management into one management tool and apply them to what in the future will be referred to as the private cloud.

Granted vCenter Operations is aimed at virtual machines, not hardware devices, and that is the departure point from its predecessors in the systems management field. But the virtual world has emerged with new needs. The established world of systems management is ill equipped to relate the configuration of a virtual machine to the capacity--or lack of it--on a set of host servers and then manage those VMs as they start dynamically moving around. New tools are needed and VCenter Operations shows that VMware is responding to the call with a vision, breadth, and grasp of what it's going to take to get there.

VMware already has tools to get a virtual machine provisioned, spun up and running, and move it around, such as vCenter and vSphere. VCenter Operations draws information out of them and feeds it into a powerful analytics engine, gained last year in the Integrion acquisition. VCenter Operations can compare current operations to baseline statistics, defining what is normal for its complex environment. Then, instead of issuing alerts and cryptic messages, it assigns a value in the form of a green, yellow, or red symbol for the server it is examining in three categories: Workload, Health, and Capacity.

With this tool, VMware moves up from object-based system monitoring, with its constant stream of alerts, to a problem-based environmental picture. VCenter Operations can detect when performance has fallen below a norm. It can look inside a host to see how each virtual machine is performing, or, if necessary, it can detect whether the host itself is overloaded. If we are moving toward a user self-provisioning environment, known as the private cloud, tools like vCenter Operations are going to be needed, not only to get there but to keep it running. -- Charles Babcock

Other Best of Interop finalists in Cloud Computing & Virtualization:
-- Quest Software
-- Vembu Technologies

Category: Collaboration

Vidyo Inc. -- VidyoMobile

Judges: Eric Krapf & Michael Healey

VidyoMobile promises to extend high-quality video conferencing to mobile users who will increasingly demand it. Especially as we move into a 4G world, video is going to be one of the most important mobile applications, and Vidyo's ability to deploy its client directly on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets represents a powerful recognition that enterprise video is going mobile. The Best of Interop judges for the Collaboration category found that Vidyo's submission is an important step towards enabling enterprise mobility.

One of the biggest challenges to mobile video will be the potential for inconsistent quality, and in this area, too, VidyoMobile represents a commendable step forward for the industry. Vidyo's Adaptive Video Layering architecture promises to deliver high-definition 720p video with resolution up to VGA on smartphones and tablets. This is critical, especially in enterprise environments, where lower-quality video and audio act as a constraint upon widespread adoption.

In short, VidyoMobile will let enterprises quickly and efficiently deploy a high quality, bandwidth-efficient video client to smartphones and tablets across the enterprise, helping to drive adoption of mobile video within the enterprise. As such, it is a worthy of recognition as Best of Interop for the Collaboration category. -- Eric Krapf

Other Best of Interop finalists in Collaboration:
-- Cisco Systems
-- NetScout Systems

Category: Data Center & Storage

Alcatel-Lucent -- Alcatel-Lucent Data Center Switching Solution Blueprint

Judges: Kurt Marko and Howard Marks

Radical changes are coming to data centers on a number of fronts, from the flattening and convergence of data and storage networks to the transformation of power and cooling hardware into smart, adaptive systems. Yet in a category so broad, it's easy to see where the most monumental and strategically significant technical innovations and vendor battles are occurring this year by looking at our three finalists, all of which are breaking new ground in improving the nervous system of every data center: the network. While not a household name in enterprise wiring closets, our winner, Alcatel-Lucent, is clearly exploiting its decades-long history as a preeminent supplier to telecoms and ISPs alike in developing its Data Center Switching Blueprint, which includes an innovative edge network mesh and companion switch, for an MPLS-compatible core coupled with management software designed for today's virtualized workloads.

While co-finalist Mellanox won the edge-switch speeds-and-feeds battle with its impressive SX1036 10/40 Gbps Ethernet device, Alcatel-Lucent prevailed by providing plenty of 10 Gbps edge capacity, an edge mesh directly supporting over 200 server ports, a "pod" architecture extensible to more than 14,000 ports at multiple sites, and a management stack providing virtual network profiles that can bind network configuration to virtualized applications and follow them as they migrate throughout the infrastructure--both within and between data centers. The pod design allows network managers to start small, with a mesh of six Omniswitch 6900 edge devices, and grow into a multisite fabric using Alcatel-Lucent's OS 10000 core routers. Because it uses Shortest Path Bridging and is compatible with MPLS WANs, the fabric can span multiple data centers and even public ISPs or cloud providers. This incremental, modular architecture is one important factor distinguishing Alcatel-Lucent's design from our other co-finalist, Juniper's QFabric. While both provide flat, high-performance, massively scaleable networks, QFabric seems more appropriate for a wholesale data center redesign, as it requires a greater architectural, hardware, and thus budgetary, commitment to deliver on the promise of a single flat yet highly scalable network.

All three finalists were strong entrants. We can't help but admire the QFabric's innovative, extensible switch backplane and the impressive custom silicon enabling Mellanox to deliver 36 40-Gbps ports in a 1U box. But in the end, Alcatel-Lucent had the most compelling design and supporting products for building extremely scalable, high-performance, cloud-like data center networks suitable for today's virtualized applications. -- Kurt Marko

Other Best of Interop finalists in Data Center & Storage:
-- Juniper Networks
-- Mellanox Technologies

Category: Infrastructure

NEC Corporation -- NEC ProgrammableFlow Switch

Judges: Mike Fratto & Jake McTigue

The NEC ProgrammableFlow switch has been chosen as a Best of Interop Category Winner because it is advancing networking technology in innovative ways. OpenFlow is a protocol that allows a centralized controller to manipulate the forwarding tables on switches and routers. The centralized control provides an opportunity to radically change the way networks are designed and managed by reducing the number of routing and switching protocols in use today. OpenFlow also enables new techniques like easily managing physical and virtual machine mobility.

The PF5240 is a hybrid switch that supports both OpenFlow and native switching and routing simultaneously so administrators can segment a portion of the switch ports to OpenFlow control and the remainder to native control. The hybrid approach allows organizations to use OpenFlow for switch ports when it makes sense and for traditional switching/routing when needed. The real power of the ProgrammableFlow switch becomes apparent when, through a controller, you can virtualize the layer 2/3 topology regardless of the underlying physical layout and visualize the network paths. The OpenFlow network can be further segregated into multiple tenants regardless of the source or destination.

OpenFlow and the PF5240 improve on bandwidth reporting of traffic trends. Unlike flow based monitoring, the PF5240 collects and reports vital stats on flows and not just a sampling. That gives a more accurate picture of network and application behavior than alternatives.

The ProgrammableFlow PF5240 is a 48-port 10/100/1000 Mbps switch with 4 10Gbps SFP+ uplinks. The PF5240 has all the switch functions we'd expect to see in a top of rack switch including redundant power supplies, remote management, and routing features including IPv6 support. -- Mike Fratto

Other Best of Interop finalists in Infrastructure:
-- Broadcom
-- Cisco Systems

Category: Network Management, Monitoring and Testing

BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. -- BreakingPoint FireStorm CTM

Judges: Mike Fratto & Steven Hill

What would you do if every single adult in the United States decided to ping your data center all at the same time? Seriously ... do you think it would it weather the storm or simply fold like a plastic grocery bag? Many companies will never need to find that out, but there are a growing number of companies that regularly deal with that kind of traffic and more, and for them the question becomes how to find out how resilient they really are before some unforeseen event does it for them. We suggest the FireStorm Cyber Tomography Machine (CTM) from BreakingPoint Systems, Inc. may be just what the doctor ordered.

Really big systems need really big testing tools and brother, the FireStorm CTM is just that. Capable of emulating 90,000,000 concurrent users simultaneously, a fully equipped FireStorm chassis only takes up 3 rack units of space, yet can, and more importantly, WILL stress your environment right to the breaking point. No pun intended; the people at BreakingPoint Systems actually take a great deal of pride in helping companies find out just when and how their systems will fail so they don't have to find out later--the hard way.

The modular chassis of a FireStorm CTM starts with a FireStorm control module and supports up to three, four-port, 10-Gbps Ethernet modules; bringing its total bandwidth to 120 Gbps of combined throughput. But what makes the FireStorm CTM even more impressive is that it doesn't just focus on raw infrastructure throughput alone; it's also a detailed testing system that that provides highly accurate modeling templates for 150 common, application-specific protocols as well as over 4,500 types of security exploits right out of the box.

What we really liked about the FireStorm was the simplicity that it brings to the complex science of production modeling. If you've done any performance testing at all you already know that the most challenging part of testing is designing a load matrix that comes even close to a real production environment. The FireStorm comes pre-loaded with a large number of pre-configured testing templates that can easily mirror an extremely wide variety of typical production scenarios. From that point you can then insert any number of potential security threats to further emulate real world use conditions and generate granular reports with the precise visibility of its 10-nanosecond resolution.

Another impressive aspect of this testing brute was the BreakingPoint Resiliency Score Lab. This is an extremely simplified, wizard-driven testing option that allows even non-expert users to initiate a highly detailed test suite that generates a verifiable, repeatable, and easy to understand Data Center Resiliency Score. It's this combination of power, simplicity, flexibility, and turnkey functionality that makes the FireStorm CTM a truly worthy Category Winner for Best of Interop 2011. And don't let the six-figure price tag put you off. When you try to calculate the cost of all the servers, applications, and networking tools, (not to mention test development time) necessary to even come close to the capabilities of a single FireStorm I think you'll find the BreakingPoint FireStorm CTM an amazing bargain. And whatever you do, don't run it on a system in production. -- Steven Hill

Other Best of Interop finalists in Network Management, Monitoring, and Testing:
-- Cisco Systems
-- Citrix Systems

Category: Performance Optimization

Talari Networks -- Mercury T750 APN Appliance

Judges: Michael Biddick & Jim Rapoza

In a tough economy, frugal IT shops are looking to cut costs and Talari can help organizations move away from private WANs and toward secure, well performing public Internet connections. Performance of the WAN is key--but price is also part of the equation. Talari can enable better WAN performance at reduced cost. The Talari Networks Mercury T750 combines multiple sources of abundant and inexpensive public Internet connectivity to deliver business-class reliability & predictable performance for enterprises, drastically reducing WAN costs.

By combining and operating public Internet connectivity in parallel, the T750 enables enterprises to utilize inexpensive bandwidth that has previously been unusable due to concerns over its performance and reliability. As a result, enterprise WAN customers gain 30x to 100x the bandwidth per dollar, can reduce monthly WAN service costs by 40% to 90%, and have greater reliability and application performance predictability than existing private WANs that use single-provider Frame Relay or MPLS.

Talari can continuously monitor the state of all available networks, using all the bandwidth most of the time, and immediately re-directing traffic to alternate paths in less than a second. The T750 enables enterprises to use public WAN bandwidth in a way that achieves equal to or better performance and predictability than private WAN bandwidth. -- Michael Biddick

Other Best of Interop finalists in Performance Optimization:
-- Certeon
-- Riverbed

Category: Security

Barracuda Networks, Inc. -- Barracuda Flex

Judges: Tim Wilson & Randy George

One of the hallmarks of security technology today is that it seldom fits right. Many of the tools are designed for consumers; others are designed primarily for Fortune 1000 enterprises with deep pockets. For companies in the middle--that is to say, most companies--most solutions require a shoehorn or a lot of extra padding. Enter Flex, a new package of products from Barracuda, which actually allows the enterprise to tailor a solution to its needs in a form that's affordable. The individual technologies offered in the Flex package may not be revolutionary, but there is some genius in the way they are packaged and delivered.

As a tool for SMBs that don't have the time or expertise to buy these products separately, Flex is a real find. It features malware protection and content filtering, including antivirus, anti-spyware, behavior analysis, intrusion detection, anti-spam, email filtering, policy management, data leak prevention, bandwidth management, rules management, traffic monitoring, application control, botnet protection, and other capabilities in a single package.

Perhaps even more importantly, users can choose to implement these capabilities in a variety of different ways--as an on-premises appliance, as a SaaS service, or as a remote agent on mobile/home devices. This enables the user to choose the level of protection they want to implement themselves, and outsource the rest to a third-party provider. And it's all offered in an affordable pricing scheme that starts at $1 per user. This is a package that makes security available and affordable to every company, rather than just those with deep pockets or great expertise. -- Tim Wilson

Other Best of Interop finalists in Security:
-- Ixia
-- Juniper Networks

Category: Wireless & Mobility

Citrix Systems -- Citrix Receiver for the iPhone

Judges: Mike Finneran & Grant Moerschel

It is no secret that mobility is sweeping through the enterprise, and users are demanding access to key applications using an ever-widening array of smartphones and tablets. Recognizing the importance of this trend, Citrix answers the call by introducing a fourth generation iOS application to support both iPhone and iPad access. This release complements other Citrix Receiver flavors for other mobile platforms that include Android, Blackberry, and Windows mobile. Citrix promises future support for webOS, Blackberry Playbook, and Chrome notebooks. An easy to install application, the Citrix Receiver delivers a secure, seamless, and consistent on-demand access to corporate data, business apps, and desktops. All Receiver implementations share a similar look and feel to ease the user learning curve.

The Citrix Receiver for the iPhone gives Apple users the ability to access Citrix's virtual desktop and any Windows, Web, or SaaS app. The app offers one-tap connect to read, create, and share documents, and can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store or from any private app store you operate through a mobile device management system. Receiver provides a range of useful features, including an on-screen virtual track pad or, if used with iOS, the ability to use a separate iPhone as an external track pad via Bluetooth. The interface automatically adjusts for connection bandwidth whether you're using it over Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, or even the slower EDGE network. To ensure security and regulatory compliance, no data is stored on the mobile device itself since the actual apps are operated remotely at the data center.

The Citrix Receiver for the iPhone was chosen for this award because of its consistent, simple implementation across this and other platforms and its ability to truly foster business mobility. -- Mike Finneran

Other Best of Interop finalists in Wireless & Mobility:
-- Enterasys Networks
-- VMware

Category: Best Start-Up

Ciphertex Data Security

Judges: Steven Hill & Andrew Conry-Murray

Small to medium-sized storage systems have been popping up everywhere these days, but security for those easily "relocated" storage systems has usually been an afterthought; if it's even being considered at all. Our Best Startup Winner--Ciphertex--may be one of the first SMB storage companies that take data security just as seriously as the other key storage variables of price, performance and data protection. We must say, it's always refreshing when companies look at the big picture when developing their product strategy.

Ciphertex came to our attention through one of their new storage systems, the CX-RANGER-EX; a portable AES 256-bit hardware-based encrypted RAID system with eSATA, FireWire 800, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity, and offering up to 15 TB of storage capacity. Though the product itself was a little overshadowed by our other Data Center BOI Finalists for 2011, we couldn't help but be impressed with the thought process behind the products and services that Ciphertex offers overall.

During our due-diligence research we found that the list of top company executives is an impressive group of seasoned storage and security professionals, and that expertise clearly shows in the design of their product matrix. We were also pleased by the fact that the degree of storage security and portability available with Ciphertex storage hardware doesn't come at a premium either; a quick review of their products showed a number of very reasonably-priced storage devices as well as a number of security-based services that deserve further examination.

The service offerings listed on their website could be directed at any number of verticals that require detailed data security or forensic data services. However, their secure storage devices are priced comparably or better than other systems without security offerings, so it's likely that Ciphertex portable storage solutions would be a good fit for practically any small to medium storage application; whether security was a priority or not. -- Steven Hill

2010 Winners | 2010 Finalists

The 2010 Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner:

Winners in each category:

In addition to these eight category winners, two special awards were also awarded:

Introducing Best of Interop 2010

For more than a decade, one of the highlights of the Interop show in Las Vegas has been Best of Interop. This annual competition allows us to shine a light on the very best that IT vendors have to offer and to recognize the progress and ingenuity of the companies that make our systems run. This year we had over 100 candidates for Best of Interop consideration in nine different categories and we are delighted to present our winners for Best of Interop 2010.

– Steven Hill – Lead Judge, Best of Interop 2010

Best of Interop (Overall)

Arista Networks - Arista 7500

Bigger and faster is the hallmark of any data center switch. Typically data center switch architectures comprised half and full rack sized switch chassis that aggregate end or row or top of rack switches which might also be aggregated making three hops from server to core. Arista’s 7500 radically increase capacity with a 10Tb backplane in a compact form factor. This switch represents the type of core data center switch you will be running in a few years. High capacity, low latency, low power draw, and small form factor.

The 7500 packs 384 non-blocking 10GB ports with 4.5 micro seconds of delay into a 11RU chassis. Priced at $140,000, the 7500 is a high capacity, low cost switch. The 7500 is DCB ready today so and can support both Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet but in addition, each blade comes with 2.4 GB of frame buffer to queue frames in the event of congestion. That’s enough buffer space to queue up 50 ms of 10Gb traffic per port. No worries about dropped frames.

The 7500 is a modular switch, so you can add capacity as you need and the switch uses the same Extensible Operating System across all of its switching products for simple management. The capacity of the 7500 means you can remove switching tiers that were required to aggregate traffic to a core switch and attach to a single access tier and then move right to the core. If you have the cabling, you can remove the access tier altogether. Face it, with virtualization, your data center looks less like a server farm and more like an high performance computing cluster. That requires a switching infrastructure and can move large amounts of data quickly and reliably. The Arista 7500 has the horsepower and that is why it won Best of Interop.

– Mike Fratto

Category: Cloud Computing

IBM - Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud

Judges: John P. Foley & Charles Babcock

The launch of IBM's development and test cloud service in the second quarter of 2010 is a milestone for Big Blue and, in some respects, for the IT industry, as well.

IBM has put an unmistakable enterprise stamp on its new offering, which is called Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud. Customers that want to tap into IBM's cloud environment have to be approved and sign a contract before they're granted access.

That model will make it difficult for individual developers and entrepreneurs, who are flocking to services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Google's App Engine, to take advantage of IBM's new service. But what will be perceived as a drawback by some will appeal to others, in particular enterprise IT departments that are wary of putting their corporate data and code side by side with unvetted third parties. IBM describes its cloud service as having "enterprise-grade" security and control.

That focus on enterprise requirements helps explain the choice of IBM's Development and Test cloud as the Best of Interop winner in the cloud computing category. The service, in beta test since October, becomes commercially available this quarter.

IBM has cloud computing environments and initiatives in its facilities around the world, but Development and Test really represents its first commercial service with a combination of the key attributes that you'd expect from the cloud – multi-tenancy, self-service, usage-based pricing, and ready-to-use virtualized software images. IBM's development and test cloud service is hosted from an IBM data center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As its name indicates, IBM's service is geared to software development and testing, an area of enterprise IT that's well suited for the cloud model. Corporate software development projects tend to temporary in nature, yet require substantial computing and storage resources when they kick into high gear. IBM says that software development and test projects can consume as much as 30% of a company's IT infrastructure, resources that are often underutilized.

A key component of the service is its use of IBM's Rational tools, which support agile development by teams of programmers from beginning to end, or so-called lifecycle development. Here too, the cloud model makes sense, facilitating collaboration among developers in different time zones and geographies.

- John Foley

Category: Collaboration

Vidyo Inc. - VidyoDesktop Executive

Judges: Andrew Conry-Murray & Eric Krapf

The airline industry seems to be doing its best to help grow the video conferencing market. As organizations tally higher ticket prices and add up the charges for carry-ons and meals (not to mention lost productivity from executives stranded due to volcanic eruption), they may be moving closer to investing in a video conferencing system.

Of course, a telepresence system that can start at $30,000 today, and reach as much as ten times that price once you adding high-definition cameras, integrated sound systems and large screens. Another option is desktop video conferencing, which can put video communication in the hands of more than just a small team of executives. According to an InformationWeek Analytics survey, 36 percent of respondents already have desktop video conferencing for some or most employees. Another 25 percent are considering desktop video conferencing.

Vidyo wins in the collaboration category because it has the potential to make widespread business video conferencing a reality. The company's VidyoDesktop Executive software runs on ordinary x86 computers and provides a high-quality video conference experience. The software delivers HD 1080p multi-point video conferencing. Vidyo uses the H.264 SVC (Scalable Video Coding) standard.

Vidyo is positioning the system as a way to put a video "appliance" on an executive's desk. Just load the software onto a touchscreen-capable laptop or netbook, attach a camera, and your executives can get the face-time with an easy-to-use system. Vidyo says enterprises can also deploy video conferencing enterprise-wide by enabling all user PCs with video conferencing capability.

Organizations have the choice of purchasing the VidyoRouter, the company's compression software, which is necessary to use VidyoDesktop, or to sign on with a service provider that hosts a VidyoRouter in the cloud. The VidyoDesktop software costs $25 per user per year. Companies have to provide the video camera (and PCs). The software can use the microphone and speakers built into most PCs and laptops, or companies can add a peripheral device, such as a USB headset.

- Andrew Conry-Murray

Category: Data Center & Storage

Mellanox Technologies - BridgeX 5020

Judges: Randy George & Steven Hill

The 3 Interop finalists in the Data Center and Storage category all brought extremely impressive and innovative solutions to the table in 2010. The evolution of Unified Computing, Virtual I/O and Coverged Ethernet are clearly the most impactful technologies that have surfaced in the data center in a long time. As a result, it wasn’t surprising to see that the 3 finalists chosen in this category either loosely or directly addressed challenges in this area.

The promise of Cisco’s OTV was substantial. OTV’s ability to interconnect geographically distributed datacenters at Layer 2 clearly has terrific potential for virtual environments that require quick and seamless disaster recovery. Our second finalist, Ixia, brought a very impressive and scalable Native Fiber Channel and FCoE testing suite to the table. With its blade design, the Ixia chassis can help analyze, test and assess a wide range of scenarios and solutions for vendors and enterprises.

Our chosen winner was the Mellanox BX5020 InfiniBand gateway. We struggled with the decision tremendously. In the enterprise, InfiniBand isn’t generally the transport of choice. However, for applications and systems that demand the most I/O possible, InfiniBand is sometimes the only solution. Part of the reason for choosing Mellanox was the price point and throughput scalability of the BX5020 bridge.

At the HBA level, Mellanox offers 40Gig of throughput for the same price as a 10Gig converged Ethernet. For virtualization scenarios with extremely high I/O needs, 10 Gig Ethernet might not cut it, and bridging FCoE to native fiber channel is still a very expensive proposition today. Mellanox impressively addresses the issue of cost and performance in the Virtual I/O space, and its solution did a bit more to move unified computing and Virtual I/O forward.

- Randy George

Category: Infrastructure

Arista Networks - Arista 7500

Judges: Mike Fratto & Howard Marks

Bigger and faster is the hallmark of any data center switch. Typically data center switch architectures comprised half and full rack sized switch chassis that aggregate end or row or top of rack switches which might also be aggregated making three hops from server to core. Arista’s 7500 radically increase capacity with a 10Tb backplane in a compact form factor. This switch represents the type of core data center switch you will be running in a few years. High capacity, low latency, low power draw, and small form factor.

The 7500 packs 384 non-blocking 10GB ports with 4.5 micro seconds of delay into a 11RU chassis. Priced at $140,000, the 7500 is a high capacity, low cost switch. The 7500 is DCB ready today so and can support both Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet but in addition, each blade comes with 2.4 GB of frame buffer to queue frames in the event of congestion. That’s enough buffer space to queue up 50 ms of 10Gb traffic per port. No worries about dropped frames.

The 7500 is a modular switch, so you can add capacity as you need and the switch uses the same Extensible Operating System across all of its switching products for simple management. The capacity of the 7500 means you can remove switching tiers that were required to aggregate traffic to a core switch and attach to a single access tier and then move right to the core. If you have the cabling, you can remove the access tier altogether. Face it, with virtualization, your data center looks less like a server farm and more like an high performance computing cluster. That requires a switching infrastructure and can move large amounts of data quickly and reliably. The Arista 7500 has the horsepower and that is why it won Best of Interop. – Mike Fratto

Category: Network Management, Monitoring and Testing

ExtraHop Networks - Network Timeout

Judges: Mike Fratto & Howard Marks

Extrahops Network Timeout is a free application analysis tool that takes packet captures and presents application analysis reports that can be used for trouble shooting and application performance management. Unlike packet analysis programs like Wireshark and Wild Packets OmniPeek that excel at packet decoding and low level troubleshooting, Network Timeout performs application analysis from layer 2 through 7. If you have ever tried to determine why applications are performing poorly with a packet analyzer, you’ll understand why Network Timeout won Best of Interop for Network Management, Monitoring, and Testing.

Network Timeout presents application through a series of graphs breaking out performance information such as packets per second, request and response times, and transaction details. It’s easy to get lost in Network Timeout’s interface at first because of all the analysis that is available. Network Timeouts analysis pull out alerts such as lost packets, re-transmits, even failed DNS queries so you can pinpoint failure easily The application analysis is equally detailed. HTTP analysis breaks out HTTP queries, the types of elements request and sent. Network Timeout even handles complex protocols like file transfers and can show what files users are accessing.

Analyzed files can be shared with others to that you can team up on troubleshooting and analysis. Extrahop is also trying to build up a community of users who can help interpret the analysis and assist in troubleshooting. Network Timeout does require full packet captures, so anything that is uploaded may contain sensitive information like usernames and passwords. If you want to share captures, be sure to scrub them first. There is a 30 MB limit on captures, but that is often enough to pinpoint problems. Network Timeout excellent analytic capabilities will help anyone tasked with performance management and troubleshooting. – Mike Fratto

Category: Performance Optimization

Spirent Communications - Spirent Avalanche Virtual

Judges: Michael Biddick & Jonathan Feldman

All the buzz today is how much money organizations can save by moving their applications into the cloud. While the delivery mechanismsof clouds (public, private, hybrid) and functions (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) vary - most organizations are in the process of develop business cases and considering ways that they can move critical components into the cloud environment.

One area often overlooked is the performance of those applications in the cloud environment. Because of the lack of transparency behind, especially public, clouds it is often difficult to test performance prior to making the leap into the environment. Many organizations simply hope that the performance will be comparable or better thantheir traditional delivery method. Hope is unfortunately not a strategy.

Spirent Avalanche Virtual solves this problem by providing organizations a way to test the performance of their applicationacross all of the cloud delivery platforms. Using stateful application traffic through both a physical and virtual infrastructure, Avalanche virtual can provide critical performance data pre and post production move into the cloud. While monitoring SaaS applications is done with user emulation, PaaS and IaaS can be monitored by placing the Avalanche virtual appliance within the cloud environment. Providing both client only and client server emulation, Avalanche Virtual canhelp make the decision to move to the cloud, as well as keep the cloud providers in-check, by continually monitoring performance in any possible cloud use case.

As a virtual appliance, Spirent Avalanche can also be deployed quickly in trouble spots to determine where persistent performance issues exist. While other monitoring solutions require costly physical appliances, or traditional software packages, they also can’t adopt to the current generation of cloud delivery platforms. Instead of purchasing a number of different tools to different use cases, Spirent may be adapted to fit the specific business needs within the cloud.

- Michael Biddick

Category: Security

TippingPoint - TippingPoint Virtual Controller (vController)

Judges: Tim Wilson & Andrew Conry-Murray

IT people agree – virtualization is one of the most important new developments to hit the data center in many years. Unfortunately, many enterprises so far have been hestitant to deploy virtualization and cloud technologies primarily because of one primary issue: security.

There have been a number of short-term "fixes" for the virtualization security problem, but the TippingPoint Virtual Controller (vController), in our opinion, is taking the first steps toward a more concrete solution. It includes integrated management capabilities that are compatible with VMware, allowing the security team to see and monitor security in the virtualized environment at a granular level. Working as a next-generation IPS, it includes up-to-the-minute security research from TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs) team and the Zero Day Initiative.

The TippingPoint vController gives organizations the ability to inspect virtual traffic with the traditional purpose-built Intrusion Prevent System appliance. For customers already using the IPS in their traditional networks, this maximizes their investment by being flexible enough to to inspect both virtual and traditional network traffic. Further, since the traffic is passed through the IPS, it is inspected and filtered with TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine service.

The vController is a key part of TippingPoint's Security Virtualization Framework, which is a broader strategy that will help enterprises enforce security policies in virtualized environments and group virtual machines into "trust zones" that will enable them to keep sensitive data isolated, even in virtual environments. The vController itself will give security administrators visibility into virtual environments, enabling them to see how the virtual network is configured and what types of traffic are crossing it. This is the sort of data that today's network and security administrators need in order to locate sensitive data, as well as where it's going, and who's accessing it.

– Tim Wilson

Category: Virtualization

Citrix Systems - XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 1

Judges: Joe Hernick & Mike Healey

Citrix XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 1. We recognize this is a point release. We also have to say that this product rose to the top of the BOI Virtualization candidates thanks to a combination of real world features, slick deployment options, and very broad client support, delivering your favorite Windows desktop to vintage thin terminals, 7-year old PCs, Macs, high-end workstations or iPads. Citrix has re-tooled its venerable ICA into "HDX," minimizing bandwidth requirements while providing solid multimedia (read YouTube or corporate video training) performance in the delivered desktop space. The product offers competent performance on old hardware while taking advantage of high-end graphics chips if your host has 'em. Not thata Citrix advertises this, but we're pretty sure this is the easiest way to get Flash working on your iPad. "Flexcast" gives IT admins a laundry list of deployment options from the same base builds, simplifying deployment in mixed enterprises for hosted or delivered virtual desktops. Bundled with a XenApp server and other Citrix back-end tools, this is a robust VDI solution.

We also have to give a shout out to Manage Engine. While this version of Application Manager didn't bring home the gold in our virtualization competition, the company's initial foray into virtualization monitoring is on the right path at a price point that will raise a few eyebrows. Manage Engine has a solid track record of traditional systems management tools, offering 80% of the big dog's features at less that 20% of the cost with decent point-in-time reporting, client-side "record and playback" for application sessions, and broad support for existing hardware, operating systems, and apps. Now they are hooking into VMware APIs, for less than $2K to manage 25 servers. That gets our attention, and if you happen to be a small to medium size business operating in the dark troubleshooting application performance issues it’s worth taking a look. We hope Manage Engine sticks to their product road map, provide deeper and broader insight across virtualization vendors, and keeps bargain pricing as a core company value.

- Joe Hernick

Category: Wireless & Mobility

Cisco Systems - Aironet 3500 Series Access Point with CleanAir technology

Judges: Mike Brandenburg & Paul Debeasi

Unlike other network technologies, wireless networks can be negatively affected by the environment around it. WiFi has to share airspace with all kinds of wireless devices like cordless phones, video surveillance systems, even the break room microwave, which are not designed to play well with others. The current set of tools to root out the troublemakers are very reactive, requiring administrators to go to the problem area and hope to catch the offender. It is a labor intensive cat and mouse game to keep today's wireless networks running at best performance.

Cisco’s Aironet 3500 Series with CleanAir technology tackles this proem head on and represents the next phase in the evolution of enterprise wireless networks: self healing, mission critical WLANs. With a combination of controllers, software and dedicated hardware on the Aironet 3500, Cisco’s WLAN solution is able to monitor, identify, and classify sources of wireless interference, determine the threat level to network performance, and if necessary, dynamically adjust the affected parts of the network around the trouble.

CleanAir also builds a historical view of the airspace, enabling administrators to locate and remove the source of interference. CleanAir brings enterprises one step closer to the reliability on their wireless networks that they already expect from their wired and gives administrators the tools to ensure it.

- Mike Brandenburg

Category: Green Award

Cyber Switching, Inc. – ePower

Judge: Steven Hill

For years now, Cyber Switching, Inc. has been all about providing high-quality and controllable power to all sizes of infrastructure applications. Their new line of ePower Power Distribution Units (PDU’s) brings a whole new level of granular power control to IT managers by offering independent, color LCD touch-screen reporting capabilities on the PDU itself; in addition to their USB and Ethernet-based remote management capabilities. Also available on the ePower series is their new Cyber Breaker® technology that allows a customer to protect a branch circuit by limiting the use of any open outlets, so that anything non-essential plugged into the PDU won’t accidentally trip an entire rack.

What made the ePower product a great choice for our Green Award was that it was designed from the ground up using the latest in power-saving technologies; including low-power microcontrollers, highly efficient latching relays and switching power supplies. All this was done to insure that the PDU itself was operating just as green as the products it was designed to protect. And just as important, the manufacture of the entire ePower line meets or exceeds the RoHS-6 standards for avoidance of hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, PBB, and PBDE.

It’s this attention to energy efficiency and environmental impact in design, construction and operation that identifies Cyber Switching, Inc. as a company truly dedicated to green technology, and we’re delighted to present them with the Green Award for 2010.

– Steven Hill

Category: Best Start-Up

ExtraHop Networks

Judge: John P. Foley

As a relative newcomer to the network management space, ExtraHop Networks gets its foot in the door with a promise of performance and scalability combined with simplicity. That and an innovative new Web service for network and application troubleshooting have earned ExtraHop Networks recognition as the Best of Interop startup company.

ExtraHop's flagship product, the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, is an appliance that provides auto discovery of network-attached devices, real-time packet processing, and archiving of performance metrics. The passive appliance (it doesn't use agents) monitors application performance, detects potential issues, and helps with troubleshooting.

At Interop, ExtraHop Networks introduced a free Web-based service called Network Timeout that lets network managers and other IT pros analyze packet captures in an online community. The service, powered by the ExtraHop appliance, provides a crowd-sourced knowledge base for app performance tuning and troubleshooting. Users can share and compare network capture files via the NetworkTimeout.com portal to access forums to get expert feedback from peers. The service supports views into applications, networks, databases, and storage systems.

At Interop, ExtraHop Networks also announced a partnership with F5 Networks to jointly market and sell ExtraHop's appliance with F5's Big-IP family of traffic managers and other modules. Based in Seattle, ExtraHop Networks was founded in 2007 by two former F5 architects. ExtraHop Networks is funded by Madrona Venture Group and private investors.

- John Foley

2010 Finalists

Cloud Computing

Collaboration

  • Alcatel-Lucent - OmniTouch 8082 My IC Phone
  • Vidyo, Inc. - VidyoDesktop™ Executive Videoconferencing
  • Zoho Corporation - Zoho Projects

Data Center and Storage

Infrastructure

Network Management, Monitoring and Testing

  • Apposite Technologies, Inc. - Netropy Network Emulation
  • ExtraHop Networks - Network Timeout
  • Gigamon - GigaSMART

Performance Optimization

  • Blue Coat Systems - Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliance
  • Cisco Systems - Cisco WAAS for Public Clouds
  • Spirent Communications - Spirent Avalanche Virtual

Security

Virtualization

  • Citrix Systems - XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 1
  • Extreme Networks - Direct Attach (NW Virtualization Architecture)
  • ManageEngine - ManageEngine Applications Manager

Wireless and Mobility

  • AirWatch - AirWatch 5.10
  • AppRiver - AppRiver's Secure Hosted Exchange
  • Cisco Systems - Upcoming addition to the Aironet Series of Access Points


2009

The 2009 Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner:

Winners in each category:

In addition to these eight category winners, two special awards were also awarded:


Best of Interop – Overall: VMware - VMware vSphere 4

With over 160 products vying for recognition, trying to decide the top winner for BOI is always a challenge. Interestingly enough, the choice for Best of Interop this year became a knock-down, drag-out challenge between two companies whose products actually fit hand in glove. Cisco’s new UCS and the newest iteration of VMware’s venerable virtualization platform, vSphere 4 were top-flight contenders to the very end. Though it was almost a chicken and egg argument, our BOI winner – vSphere 4 emerged as the winner because of its outstanding innovation, industry-wide impact and substantial improvement over previous generations.

Cloud Computing & Virtualization: VMware - VMware vSphere 4

Category Judges:
Charles Babcock – InformationWeek
Steven Schuchart – Current Analysis, Inc.

The adoption of server virtualization is growing by leaps and bounds every day and VMware has really stepped up in delivering the next generation platform offering advanced features and capabilities that will propel x86-based server virtualization well into the next decade. The new and beefier vSphere 4 can manage up to 1,280 virtual machines on 32 servers - or an average 40 VMs per server - although there's no reason vSphere can't manage more than 40 if the customer wishes to move in that direction.

Each server in a vSphere cluster or private cloud may have up to 64 cores and each VMware host under vSphere 4 can support up to 32 terabytes of RAM. But it's not the statistical dimensions of vSphere 4 that are as important as the way that it changes the way we think about the data center. VMware’s new vSphere 4 gives enterprises new levels of reliability and new features that competitors in this market space cannot currently match.

For example, the innovative Fault Tolerance feature of vSphere 4 allows enterprises to designate two identical blades within a chassis as a fault tolerant pair. When one blade fails, the second blade has an identical copy of the first, all the way down to memory and internal IO operations. This allows for instant fail over, a feature that has in past only been found on specialty servers designed for full fault tolerance. VMware Fault Tolerance can also automatically bring another identical blade into sync, re-creating a fault tolerant pair if such a blade is available.

Then there's vShield Zones, which address the security vulnerability of virtual machines by giving them a zone definition of what security measures must accompany their operation. This definition then follows the virtual machine around when it is moved by vMotion from one server to another. VMware Host Profiles in vSphere 4 make it much easier to determine what combination of components is a balanced one for the workload under consideration. And for added resource conservation, VMware Distributed Power Management tracks which servers are underutilized and could be shut down if their virtual machines were migrated to another server.

Under vSphere 4, the fully virtualized data center is really beginning to take shape and vSphere 4 is a big step forward in server virtualization; bringing new features and value along with general upgrades that make it truly Best of Interop. – Charles Babcock

Collabortion & UC: Cisco - WebEx Node on Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers

Category Judges:
Nick Hoover – InformationWeek
Brad Shimmin - Current Analysis, Inc.

While cloud computing and software as a service continue to gain traction in the enterprise, bandwidth and performance remain ongoing concerns of IT pros. Cisco's WebEx Node on ASR 1000 Series routers is a blade that runs WebEx software like an on premises extension of Cisco's hosted service, greatly improving performance while decreasing bandwidth requirements.

Without a WebEx Node, all of a company's WebEx sessions connect over the Internet via disparate streams, potentially using up large amounts of bandwidth, especially with WebEx's new video and voice capabilities.

The WebEx Node acts as a point of presence at the edge router, meaning that internal meetings are hosted and switched on site at the closest available node to consolidate required bandwidth so that, in the case of a company with a huge meeting, there's only one stream instead of hundreds. Since the WebEx Node is embedded in the ASR, network admins can also continue to maintain controls over network policies via ASR features like deep packet inspection.

One success story: according to Cisco, one WebEx Node customer had a need to have monthly meetings with thousands of employees, but didn't want to go purchase all the bandwidth required for once-a-month meetings, and instead rented microwave links that didn't provide the best user experience. The WebEx Node has saved enough bandwidth that the company has turned on other pieces of WebEx like video that the company was hesitant to bring on board before. Cisco estimates companies using the WebEx Node can decrease bandwidth use by WebEx by up to 90% and WAN costs by up to 67%.

The 12-core processor, 4 Gbytes of memory, 256 Gbyte hard drive of the WebEx Node can accelerate the performance of up to 500 WebEx sessions via a single blade. When the node reaches capacity, it simply automatically overflows to the Web. Meetings that include both internal and external participants traverse the Web via encrypted SSL traffic.

Look for more from Cisco on this: the company hopes to partner with third parties to build something similar for other services. – Nick Hoover

Data Center & Storage: Cisco - Unified Computing System

Category Judges:
Steven Hill – InformationWeek
Ray Lucchesi - Silverton Consulting

Throughout the beginning of 2009 there was a load of speculation regarding whether or not networking giant Cisco would make a move into the general computing hardware space. Well, the waiting is finally over because on April 16th Cisco announced their first computing platform, the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Based on a blade server core, the UCS offers all of the efficiencies inherent in blade server technology - but ups the ante by adopting some pretty interesting twists on conventional server/network relationships.

It’s obvious that Cisco was targeting the high-density virtualization market when it came to designing the system, the UCS chassis and blades take a more streamlined approach than others in the industry by reducing the number of components in each chassis without a huge compromise in processor density at rack level. At present each 6-U chassis can support up to 8- B200 M1 half-blade, or 4- B250 M1 full-blade servers. Both blade designs have two sockets for new Intel Xeon 5500-Series (Nehalem) quad-core processors, with the key difference between the two being RAM capacity. The B200 can hold a substantial 12 DIMMs (96GB) of DDR3 memory, but the B250 offers an eye-popping 48 DIMMs – or up to 384GB of memory per full-width blade. This would allow configurations from 64 cores and 768GB per chassis, to only 32 cores but 1,536GB per chassis for those apps that could benefit from a little more memory.

With memory no longer being an issue the next big trick was supplying those blades with enough IO, so each half-blade is designed to support 20Gbps of redundant IO throughput, while the full blade has 40Gbps of bandwidth. At present Cisco offers converged fabric blade adapters from both Emulex and QLogic, as well as their own M81KR Virtual Interface mezzanine IO card based on their Unified Fabric design. All three cards are dual-10Gb adapters and capable of offering numerous virtual interfaces that can be configured for either Ethernet or Fibre-Channel traffic.

To manage all this bandwidth at the backplane of the chassis there’s room for dual UCS 2104XP Fabric Extenders that can provide 80Gbps of throughput, aggregate all IO traffic and provide the interface for managing IO and blade server configuration. Breaking from conventional wisdom, Cisco has no management modules in their chassis and instead utilizes external Cisco UCS 6100-series Fabric Interconnects to aggregate the IO from and provide role-based management for all devices within the UCS chassis, as well as provide outside connectivity for FC and Ethernet. This allows each chassis and blade to remain stateless and supports the dynamic transfer of identities such as MAC addresses, World Wide Names and IP addresses to all components within the system when they require modification or replacement.

It’s clear that Cisco really examined the server virtualization challenge carefully when they designed the UCS. Everywhere you look, you can see how they focused on removing virtualization bottlenecks and enabling flexible device management at every level - plus they’ve left plenty of room for growth. That’s why the UCS is our choice for the BOI Data Center and Storage Category winner for 2009. – Steven Hill

Infrastructure: Juniper Networks - SRX650 Services Gateway

Category Judges:
Mike Fratto – InformationWeek
William Terrill - Current Analysis, Inc.

Juniper SRX650: Branch Office Swiss Army Knife - Multi-service branch boxes that combine multiple features like switch ports, routing, firewall, VPN, and so on, into a single system is nothing new. But Junipers SRX650 packs a bunch of horsepower and features with room for expansion into a single unit. Priced at $16000 for the chassis which includes routing, switching, firewall, IPSec VPN, and content filtering all running on JunOS and managed through ob board GUI or Junipers Network and Security Manager.

The modular SRX650 offers a handful of common interface options for T1/E1 and 16 or 24 port Ethernet module with or with out PoE. Juniper plans on adding DS3, OC3, and OC12 modules in the future. The switch fabric can push 120 GBps per switch/route engine (SRE) and dual, hot swappable, SRE’s in active/active failover is planned for the future. Each SRE is a high capacity computing system featuring a 12 core processor, 2GB of ram, hardware cryptographic acceleration and hardware based UTM signature matching.

The impressive hardware performance features 7 Gb/s firewall with NAT, 1.5 Gbps VPN, 900 Mbps AV. Two SRX650’s can be installed in an active/active fail-over mode maximizing your investment utilizing both units. Other security features like IPS, Web filtering, anti-virus and anti-spam are an additional software license. Dual 645W power supply can 32 PoE ports at 15.4 watts per port or more ports if each uses fewer watts.

The SRX-650 comes with a wealth of software features such as firewall, VPN, IDP/IPS, content filtering, Unified Access Control, routing and switching at a relatively low cost coupled with Junipers plans to add more high availability features, add new processing cards for application acceleration and integration with Junipers Network Security Manager (NSM) make the SRX650 an excellent candidate for a branch office appliance is why was selected as the Best of Interop Infrastructure award. – Mike Fratto

Network Management: ScienceLogic - EM7 G3

Category Judges:
Andrew Conry-Murray – InformationWeek
Bruce Boardman - Syracuse University

Science Logic's EM7 G3 is all about scalability. With a target audience of large enterprises and service providers, the network and business service monitoring system provides a package of features designed for large-scale deployments, including service monitoring for private and public clouds.

EM7 G3 takes a mostly agentless approach to monitoring. Customers deploy collector appliances at key points on the network. These appliances can be configured to monitor a variety of devices and software, from network hardware to applications, operating systems and servers, both physical and virtual. Collectors gather event data from logs and SNMP traps, performance statistics and configuration data, including hardware and software configurations. To speed discovery, the G3 uses fingerprints to discover device attributes, including which ports are open and what applications may be running on the device.

The company claims a single collector appliance can monitor 200 to 500 devices, and accept updates on 250 items per device per minute. Collectors process much of the information themselves rather than send raw data back to the central database. Collectors can be configured only to send changes back to the database. The database normalizes and stores information from the collectors.

The product can be deployed in a multitenancy mode, which is ideal for service providers that want to provide monitoring information to multiple customers. Enterprises can use the multitenancy deployment for chargebacks to different departments, or to set up separate monitoring interfaces for various private clouds.

The product also lets administrators perform end-to-end polling of public cloud applications. It uses an agent installed at a user site. Administrators use the agent to check availability and latency of SaaS applications such as Salesforce, or for applications running on public cloud services such as Amazon's EC2. - Andrew Conry-Murray

Performance Optimization: Expand Networks - Virtual Accelerator

Category Judges:
Mike Fratto – InformationWeek
Larry Chaffin - Pluto Networks

Expands Virtual Accelerator brings application acceleration into virtualized environments in a meaningful way by leveraging the strengths of virtualization—resource sharing and application mobility. The Virtual Accelerator, starting at $995, is a full feature soft appliance that runs on VMWare’s line of hypervisors from workstation through ESX Server 3 and includes support for layer 4-7 acceleration, advanced compression, and wide area file services.

WAN optimization advanced compression caches data to disk which is used to compress the traffic on the wire. If the virtual appliance is configured to use the SAN available to the hypervisor, Virtual Accelerators can be added or moved to another hypervisor connected to the same SAN and start using the existing disk cache immediately. That means in the event of a computer hardware failure, a new virtual appliance can be running with a warm cache in the time it takes to create a new instance—a few minutes. The Virtual Accelerator also benefits from VMware’s high availability to be restarted on a separate server in the event of hardware failure and distributed resource scheduler to be managed without IT intervention.

It costs per remote office rise linearly as more offices are added. One way organizations are reducing costs is through consolidating applications back to a data center and reducing computers in the office. Using virtualization to consolidate critical resources onto a single platform makes sense and fitting in Expands Virtual Accelerator as one more service reduces another remote system. Expands Virtual Accelerator solves practical IT issues and leverages the flexibility and versatility of virtualization and that is why it won Best of Interop’s Performance Optimization category. – Mike Fratto

Security: CHARGE Anywhere - CHARGE Anywhere PCI Security Solution

Category Judges:
Tim Wilson – Dark Reading/InformationWeek
Andrew Braunberg – Current Analysis, Inc.

This year our judges have picked what may be a dark horse winner in the Security category: Charge Anywhere. It is a third-party service that basically allows small businesses to handle credit card data in a manner that makes them PCI-compliant right out of the box.

We chose Charge Anywhere because PCI compliance is a huge problem for the retail and banking industries, and small business is the greatest weak spot in the credit card chain – it is estimated that fewer than 25 percent of small businesses are PCI compliant, and some estimates go as low as 10 percent. The Charge Anywhere service makes it possible for all small businesses to achieve the same level of PCI compliance as major retailers, but at a price that isn’t much more than a phone bill. A service like this could really make a difference in how many small companies comply with PCI – and take the credit card data out of their hands, eliminating a major entry point for identity theft and other forms of computer crime.

From a technical perspective, Charge Anywhere is unique. The company has spent four years essentially building a Level-1-compliant data center that can accept input from all types of credit-card-processing devices – point of sale terminals of all different vendors and types, mobile devices used by fleet services and retailers at trade shows, even desktop PCs or Blackberries. Although there are some PCI compliance offerings on the back end (mainly credit card processors), and at the retailer end (mostly POS terminals and associated services), this is the only service that offers PCI compliance on both ends *without* forcing the retailer to change the hardware or software they use for handling credit cards. And because it’s a service, it doesn’t require the end user to know anything about PCI compliance or security, and it essentially eliminates all need for the small business to get itself in trouble by storing personal credit card data.

We could’ve picked another enterprise box or appliance, but this is the one thing that we saw that was truly *different* that also meets a crying need in the market, and also is transformational in the way it affects the everyday operations of the businesses that use it. – Tim Wilson

Wireless & Mobility: Aruba – 600-Series Branch Office Controllers

Category Judges:
Michael Brandenburg - InformationWeek
David Molta – Syracuse University

Traditionally, deploying networks to remote sites meant a lot of work for IT personnel. Many times, the gear is brought in house, configured, repackaged, and finally shipped back out to the remote site. Installation typically involves putting an IT person onsite, adding travel expenses and lost productivity to the costs of the remote deployment.

Aruba’s 600 Series Branch Office Controllers mitigate many of these pain points of delivering wireless and wired network to branch locations and remote sites. The controllers, part of Aruba’s Virtual Branch Networking architecture, can be configured by having remote users simply enter the web address of the central WLAN controller. A secure VPN link is created and all wired and wireless configuration, user security policies, and the remote site is brought online, without putting IT boots on the ground.

If there is trouble, a simplified diagnostic page helps remote users quickly relay the status to the network administrators, and if necessary, reset the controller to factory fresh and reload from the main controller. Combined with options for network attached storage, 3G cellular connectivity, and wireless mesh services, the Aruba 600 Branch Office Controller covers all the bases for a branch office in a box solution, no matter where the branch office may be.

As many enterprises transition from traditional offices and cube farms to remote sites, virtual offices, and telecommuting, the benefits of Aruba’s zero-touch remote management are clear: simplified configuration and management, reduced deployment costs, and minimizing the hardware footprint of remote locations. – Michael Brandenburg

Best Start Up Company: Rhomobile – Rhodes

Category Judge:
John Foley – InformationWeek

So many smartphones, so little time, what's an application developer to do? Rhomobile's open source framework may be the answer. Rhomobile's Ruby-based framework, called Rhodes, lets developers write applications in HTML for five of the most popular smartphone operating environments: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

If ever an argument was to be made for a write-once, run-anywhere approach, smartphones are it. Businesses have a hard time mandating that employees use a standard mobile device, and, given the many great options out there, why should they? The trick isn't to limit user choice, but to develop capabilities for a variety of platforms efficiently. Rhomobile lets you do that.

For all of these reasons—its openness, portability, and, with HTML, familiarity—Rhomobile is our choice for the best startup at Interop. The privately held company is located in Silicon Valley and has received venture funding from vSpring Capital.

Rhodes 1.0 was introduced in March. The framework allows access to smartphone capabilities such as GPS, personal contacts, SMS push, and camera, works with software-as-a-service applications, and supports offline work via a synchronized local data store.

Because Rhomobile is startup, it has few named customers and not much of a track record. For those reasons, potential customers should exercise due diligence and spend time with the Rhodes framework before getting in too deep. That said, Rhodes is a promising solution to a common smartphone dilemma. - John Foley

Green Award: Cisco – Cisco EnergyWise

Category Judge:
Steven Hill – InformationWeek

Every year we’re delighted to see more and more companies nominating new products that are designed with energy efficiency in mind. This is a great thing when you consider the scale of modern data centers, and we’re seeing even more enlightened vendors extending their green initiatives to include their manufacturing practices, packaging and end-of-life strategies to reduce their impact overall impact on the environment.

This year’s Green Category winner - Cisco EnergyWise – is a surprising new centralized energy management initiative by Cisco designed to extend energy monitoring and management capabilities well beyond their own products. With the January 2009 purchase of intelligent middleware company Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence, Inc., Cisco laid the foundation for a long-term strategy that leverages capabilities of many of their switching and routing products as a communication platform to monitor, measure and control the energy use of systems and devices throughout the enterprise.

Beginning in March of this year, Cisco has offered a free firmware patch for a number of Catalyst products to enable device communication and discovery for this project, but this is only part of a much larger and aggressive concept to establish role-based energy monitoring and management capabilities for Ethernet devices like IP phones, computers, printers and wireless endpoints.

From a big-picture standpoint, this system is also envisioned to be extensible to virtually any network-enabled system such as lighting, HVAC and other facility-wide control devices. In their goal to establish such a complex and broad power management platform it appears that Cisco is going to great lengths to offer an open API on their end, as well as remaining adaptable to API’s from existing IP-manageable systems. This also applies to the top level, where the EnergyWise system can be managed by either Cisco’s Network Management products or a third-party energy management solution. Their plan for utilizing your existing infrastructure for energy management can lead to greater energy efficiency/lower costs for you, a cleaner planet for us and wins Cisco the 2009 Interop Green Award. - Steven Hill

2008

The 2008 Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner:

Winners in each category:

In addition to these eight category winners, two special awards were also awarded:

Jump down to see the entire pool of 2008 Best of Interop finalists from which the winners were selected.


Data Center and Storage

Winner: Mellanox Technologies - ConnectX EN with FCoE
Judges: Drew Conry-Murray, Ray Lucchesi - Silverton Consulting

Mellanox Technologies’ ConnectX EN is a single chip that provides full Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) functionality. The ConnectX adapter supports TCP/IP stateless offload and Fibre Channel transport in hardware. The company claims the adapter can improve performance of both Ethernet and Fibre Channel environments, delivering higher IOPs and reducing latency.

The adapter is aimed at networking, storage and clustering applications, as well as virtualized environments. Mellanox says its own testing demonstrates the adapter can get line-rate throughput of jumbo frames with 5 to 16 virtual machines. The product supports VMware’s ESX and Citrix’s XenServer hypervisors.

By offloading CPU-intensive FC and SCSI processing to hardware, the adapter can boost performance across the entire switching fabric. Data center managers can also cut back on adapters, cables and switches while consolidating different traffic types across the same Ethernet link. The product uses a heat sink rather than a fan, which means one less part to fail. The ConnectX EN supports PCI-Express 2.0. Media interconnect support includes XFP, SFP, CX4 and 10GBaseT.

Infrastructure

Winner: Cisco - Cisco Nexus 7000 Series
Judges: Mike Fratto, Steve Schuchart - Current Analysis

The Nexus 7000 isn’t as much of a leap forward in technology as much as it’s the data center switching platform you will be using for the next 10 years. The 7000 is built to scale with a 15 terabits per second back plane and supporting up to 512 10Gbps ports. Future modules are planned to support 40 and 100 Gbps. One of the newest enhancements is support for enhanced Ethernet where ports support both Ethernet and Fiberchannel with Fiberchannel over Ethernet (FCoE) planned removeing the need for separate switch fabrics for data and storage. The new operating system, IOS-NX is a module IOS allowing seamless upgrades to the OS and modules with zero down time. IOS-NX also supports virtual device contexts so problems in one virtual device won’t impact other virtual devices. The Nexus 7000 is clearly designed to address the needs of the data center today and tomorrow.

Network and Application Performance Optimization

Winner: Cisco - Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) 674 and Cisco WAAS v4.1
Judges: Mike Fratto, Mike Brandenburg - Current Analysis
Cisco WAE 674 with WAAS v4.1 and Windows Server 2008 brings together the benefits of WAN optimization which are more response applications traversing the WAN and lower WAN utilization and maintains the localized requirement of critical network services like Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP. Windows Server 2008 is the first virtual server blade , a software module, running on the WAE hardware. The virtual computer resources are limited to reserve room for the WAE to optimize WAN traffic removing the possibility of impacting WAN performance. Cisco is developing a partner program so other virtualized computers can be certified to run on the WAE, but that program won’t be as open their AXP Partner Program. The optimization of enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle applications, Microsoft Exchange, and real-time video, Cisco makes good on its promise to optimize the WAN, ensure critical services are always available, and reduce branch office costs.

Network Management, Software and Services

Winner: Splunk - The Splunk Platform (including Splunk 3.2 and Splunk for Windows)
Judges: Nick Hoover, Bruce Boardman - Syracuse University

Traditionally, network management is done in silos. Disparate software handles different systems. With that in mind, four-year-old Splunk has taken on the task of unifying management by introducing the concept of search to IT management.

The Splunk Platform collects logs, configurations, messages, alerts and stats from any software or hardware that makes information about itself available, and then allows admins to search that information, build custom reports and create alerts based on the results of continuous indexing.

That idea has proved incredibly popular. More than 150,000 copies of Splunk's free version alone have been downloaded. Companies like Netcordia, WildPackets and Radware are all packaging additional capabilities into Splunk. The system can also feed scripts into systems like IBM Tivoli.

Splunk, a Web app that looks and feels like a user friendly Web 2.0 site complete with quick-loading AJAX results and Flash-based graphs and charts, comes with a large number of canned searches right out of the box, and can access pretty much anything with a system log. That means it can search for everything from CPU usage to 503 errors and run custom reports on such obscure things as average CPU usage by user command.

In March, Splunk launched a new version, Splunk 3.2, and announced the Splunk Platform, a common set of services, APIs and SDKs to allow third parties to create their own applications to run on Splunk. Splunk's own new Splunk for PCI compliance is the first of those, and provides 125 canned searches, reports and alerts for auditing and compliance. Splunk 3.2 includes new search features and now makes Splunk available on Windows, adding to its availability on Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX and Linux.

Security

Winner: Palo Alto Networks - PA-4000 Series Next Generation Firewall with PANOS v2.0
Judges: Tim Wilson, Andrew Braunberg - Current Analysis, John Sawyer

One of the goals of the Best of Interop Awards is to identify technologies that will not only change the lives of IT professionals, but also re-shape the day-to-day lives of businesses and end users. For this year’s Best of Show, we’ve selected a product that has the potential to affect IT, business, and end users: the PA-4000 next-generation firewall from Palo Alto Networks.

The PA-4000 is a firewall that can identify and monitor traffic from more than 600 applications, enabling IT to either allow, block, or restrict access to those applications across an enterprise network. Its purpose-built processor allows the PA-4000 to sort and apply company policies to every application that a user might have in the enterprise – without significantly slowing the performance of the network. The PA-4000 also allows enterprises to set policies on particular categories of applications – such as video or instant messaging – and allow or block users’ access to new and emerging applications in those categories, even if IT isn’t yet aware of them.

The PA-4000 has the potential to change the relationship between the IT security department and the rest of the business. Instead of simply saying “no” to broad types of traffic, such as HTML, the enterprise can now choose to allow, block, or restrict access to specific applications, according to the needs and culture of the business. If the company wants to allow employees to use a specific application in off hours, but not during business hours, it can do that. If it wants to allow one department to use an application but not another department, it can do that. Essentially, the Palo Alto technology enables the business to set specific policies on how its employees, customers and partners use IT resources in the course of the day – and enforce those policies with a real “gate” that prevents policy abuse. It also allows companies to see how applications are actually used within the enterprise, enabling businesses to better gauge their productivity and efficiency – not only in the IT infrastructure, but at the user’s desktop.

While the PA-4000 is still a new product on the market, we believe its potential to improve the productivity of the business and the day-to-day behavior of end users is truly great. That’s why we chose it to be this year’s Best of Show.

Software

Winner: spigit - Ideaspigit
Judges: Charlie Babcock, Brad Shimmin - Current Analysis

Many companies purport to enable the social enterprise or leverage the wisdom of crowds with Web 2.0 tools that combine voting, tagging, and annotations to bubble up ideas and issues. Often, however, mainstream crowdsourcing solutions of this type do nothing but elevate the lowest common denominator and truly valuable contributions are often lost amid the noise of a large social network. Conversely, Spigit's IdeaSpigit automates idea graduation through a series of algorithms that rank ideas based upon user and idea facets including reputation, buzz, frequency, weighted analysis, role influence and entitlements.

The end result is an enterprise social productivity solution capable of pinpointing the most qualified contributors, not just the most popular users within very large communities. Though IdeaSpigit has only been on the market a short time, it has garnered the attention of some very large, high-profile customers.

VoIP and Collaboration

Winner: Mitel - Mitel Communications Suite
Judges: Rick Martin, Rob Arnold - Current Analysis

Designed to bring unified communications to mid-sized business users of standard Sun Microsystems servers, the Mitel Communications Suite integrates the company's flagship 3300 IP Communications Platform software and other applications (mobility, Web conferencing, unified messaging, and so on) into a single system for enterprises.

Supporting up to 5000 users per Sun X4150 SunFire server, the Mitel suite features Linux-based call-processing software, HTML and XML support on desktop phones, support for Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 and SIP trunking for full interoperability for most major vendors.

With its tightly coupled call control and UC applications, the Mitel Communications Suite provides a single package, on a commercial server, for medium-sized businesses. By consolidating low-power consumption telephony and server hardware platforms, it should provide significant operating cost reductions. Managing voice services as an application on a standard Sun server offers a range of benefits to IT managers, including simplified installation, ease of maintenance, improvements in business processes, and reduce costs and time for deployments.

The Mitel CS will be available in the second quarter of 2008.

Wireless and Mobility

Winner: AirMagnet Inc. - AirMagnet Analyzer and Survey Suite for 802.11n
Judges: Frank Bulk, Sean Ginevan, Jameson Blandord

AirMagnet’s latest release of its Wi-Fi Analyzer Pro 8 and Survey PRO 6 tools in the form of a suite has raised the bar yet again. Aptly denoted “for 802.11n”, at this time this suite has no similar competitor, yet it’s a valuable, if not necessary, tool for those deploying 802.11n gear.

The survey tool provides predictive modeling for 802.11n, taking into consideration the building’s physical characteristics. One of the key features of 802.11n is MIMO which takes advantage of multipath and multiple antennas to improve link margins and performance. But multipath constantly changes, which means that SNR and RSSI measurements are insufficient proxies for predicting coverage and performance. Active surveys provide a real-world measurement of data rates, packet loss, and retry information. Predictive simulation of performance is then based on real traffic. Specific to 802.11n is the ability to display operational modes (Greenfield, Mixed, or Legacy) and channel widths to verify that the wireless network is configured as expected.

The Analyzer tool smartly adds 802.11n features without information overload. In one of the main screens an “802.11n” option can be chosen from the menu which shows only 802.11n devices and adds columns to display additional information. In the channel view screen only the rates in use are displayed rather than the 80+ PHY rates possible between 802.11a/b/g/n.

Because 802.11n has added so many new and yet unfamiliar features and options for the average network technician, the Analyzer tool includes a Learning Assistant which are mini-tutorials with graphical content. They teach best practices using live examples.

Legacy equipment reduces aggregate throughput, so Analyzer’s Airwise assists by pointing out elements that affect performance. If 802.11n APs or clients are not operating at peak performance, AirMagnet’s tool also suggests ways that settings can be optimized. If settings cannot be adjusted due to policies or circumstances outside the network technician’s control, they will at least have a better understanding of the impact. To make sure that link rates perform as advertised, AirMagnet has built in the opensource software “Iperf“ to run downstream and upstream tests that return not only speeds, but packet retries and loss that can impact those results.

Both the Analyzer and Planning products build on top of the previous versions, so all the capabilities that customers have become accustomed to remain present. The AirMagnet Laptop Analyzer and Survey Suite for 802.11n also comes with a custom 802.11n wireless adapter card.

Best Start-Up Company

Winner: Vidyo, Inc. - VidyoConferencing™
Judges: John Foley, Art Wittmann

Vidyo was picked Best Of Interop’s best startup for its innovative family of videoconferencing products. Two years in development, Vidyo introduced its product suite, ranging from desktop software to a room system, in January 2008. Other pieces include a video-conferencing gateway, portal, and router. Vidyo uses scalable video coding, or SVC, to deliver high quality video streaming over general-purpose IP networks. The VidyoRouter adapts to available bandwidth and sends end points only as many packets as they’re capable of handling throughout a video session. The end result is “high definition” video over IP, an attractive option for companies looking for a flexible, low-hassle conferencing system that doesn’t compromise on video quality. One thing we like is that the system is easily extended to workers in branch and home offices, so that managers in main offices aren’t the only ones with access. That means Vidyo’s system should find regular and widespread use in a company, rather than collect dust as a high-end system that’s only turned on for special occasions. Vidyo employs the H.264/SVC video compression standard, while its gateway connects to existing Multipoint Control Unit systems, which gives companies a way to implement newer videoconferencing technology without ditching their earlier investments. Notably, Cisco has given Vidyo its own stamp of approval; Cisco is licensing Vidyo’s technology for use in its Unified Communications desktop products.

Green Award

Winner: Foundry Networks - BigIron RX Module
Judges: Steven Hill, Art Wittmann

As the largest single consumer of energy in a typical corporate environment, more and more IT managers are being asked to find new ways to reduce rapidly increasing power costs. Hardware vendors are clearly responding to this trend with more energy-efficient products, but being truly Green can mean so much more. The 2008 winner of the Best of Interop Green Award – Foundry Networks – has looked beyond energy consumption alone and adopted an eco-friendly philosophy that covers virtually every aspect of their product from beginning to end.

Like a growing number of computer products, Foundry’s new RX-BI16XG 16-port 10GbE SFP Module for the BigIron RX Series is manufactured to RoHS specifications to reduce toxic waste during production. In operation, the module has a maximum power consumption of only 18W per 10GbE port – the lowest in its class - and each port offers an idle mode that further reduces consumption by 30% when not in use. In high-density, 10GbE applications a single BigIron RX-32 chassis using 16-port 10GbE SFP Modules supports up to 512 - 10GE ports with only a maximum power draw of 13,100W; a fraction of the power consumption of their closest competition. Foundry has also adopted the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) disposal process that supports returning the product for recycling of usable material and proper disposal.

Best of Interop

Winner: Palo Alto Networks - PA-4000 Series Next Generation Firewall with PANOS v2.0

(Also the winner in the Security category) One of the goals of the Best of Interop Awards is to identify technologies that will not only change the lives of IT professionals, but also re-shape the day-to-day lives of businesses and end users. For this year’s Best of Interop, our judges selected a product that has the potential to affect IT, business, and end users: the PA-4000 next-generation firewall from Palo Alto Networks.

The PA-4000 is a firewall that can identify and monitor traffic from more than 600 applications, enabling IT to allow, block, or restrict access to those applications across an enterprise network. Its purpose-built processor allows the PA-4000 to sort and apply company policies to every application that a user might have in the enterprise – without significantly slowing the performance of the network. The PA-4000 also allows enterprises to set policies on particular categories of applications – such as video or instant messaging – and allow or block users’ access to new and emerging applications in those categories, even if IT isn’t yet aware of them.

The PA-4000 has the potential to change the relationship between the IT security department and the rest of the business. Instead of simply saying “no” to broad types of traffic, such as HTML, the enterprise can now choose to allow, block, or restrict access to specific applications, according to the needs and culture of the business. If the company wants to allow employees to use a specific application in off hours, but not during business hours, it can do that. If it wants to allow one department to use an application but not another department, it can do that. The Palo Alto technology enables the business to set specific policies on how its employees, customers and partners use IT resources in the course of the day – and enforce those policies with a real “gate” that prevents policy abuse. It also allows companies to see how applications are actually used within the enterprise, enabling businesses to better gauge their productivity and efficiency – not only in the IT infrastructure, but at the user’s desktop.


Finalists:

Data Center and Storage
Product Company
Imation SSD PRO 7000 Imation Corp.
BigIron RX Module Foundry Networks
ConnectX EN with FCoE Mellanox Technologies

Infrastructure
Product Company
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Cisco
Windows Server 2008 Microsoft
WMware VDI VMware

Network and Application Performance Optimization
Product Company
Riverbed Optimization System 5.0 Riverbed Technology
Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) 674 and Cisco WAAS v4.1 Cisco
Equalizer VLB Coyote Point Systems

Network Management, Software and Services
Product Company
PanView iQ Panduit Corp.
AirWave Wireless Management Suite 6 AirWave Wireless
The Splunk Platform (including Splunk 3.2 and Splunk for Windows) Splunk

Security
Product Company
Webroot E-Mail Security SaaS Webroot
Iron Port S-Series IronPort
PA-4000 Series Next Generation Firewall with PANOS v2.0 Palo Alto Networks

Software
Product Company
Microsoft Hyper-V / SUSE Linux Xen Hypervisor Microsoft (with Novell)
OmniTouch Advanced Communications Server (ACS) Alcatel-Lucent
Ideaspigit spigit

VoIP and Collaboration
Product Company
OpenScape Video Siemens Communications
WebEx PCNow 4.0 WebEx Communications (Cisco)
Mitel Communication Suite Mitel

Wireless and Mobility
Product Company
Enterprise Mobility Business RFS6000 Wireless LAN Switch Motorola
AirMagnet Analyzer and Survey Suite for 802.11n AirMagnet Inc.
10GE TereScope Optical Wireless System MRV Communications


2006

Application Networks and Performance

Crescendo Networks
Crescendo ALP (Application Layer Processing)

Data Center and Storage

D-Link
D-Link xStack Storage iSCSI SAN Arrays (ISN-3000 Series)

Infrastructure

ConSentry Networks
CS4048X, Secure LAN Switch

Network Software and Services

eTelemetry, Inc.
Locate

Security

Application Security, Inc.
AppRadar 3.0

VoIP and Collaboration

Sipera Systems
Sipera IPCS 310

Wireless and Mobility

Reva
SystemsTag Acquisition Processor - Platform Edition

Best Startup Product

Kaidea Innovation, Inc
NASVault

Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner

Crescendo Networks
Crescendo ALP (Application Layer Processing)



2005

Application Networks and Performance

LogLogic, Inc.
ST 2000/3000 Aggregator ApplianceNetwork Infrastructure

Data Center and Storage

Foundry Networks
BigIron RX-Series

Infrastructure

BitShield Corporation
BS-3Gweb-I-2400

Network Software and Services

Coradiant
TrueSight TS 1100

Security

V-Secure Technologies
V-Secure Intrusion Prevention Solutions (v100) v. 8.0

VoIP and Collaboration

Siemens Communications
Siemens HiPath OpenScape Telephony Control Link

Wireless and Mobility

Meru Networks
Meru Radio Switch

Best Startup Product

Xirrus
XS-3900 Wireless LAN Array

Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner

Foundry Networks
BigIron RX-Series

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