2010 Winners

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