Interop 2011: Super fast switches everywhere

On the show floor, I was impressed by HP's optical backplane, Cisco Cius, Extreme 40G switch

At Interop, I took a closer look at the HP optical backplane the HP Labs is working on and grew even more impressed. It was one of the biggest innovations I saw at the show this year. This will one day greatly speed up switches.

Here's a video I took of the device (you will need to turn your volume up all the way to hear the video due to server noise on the floor at Interop). The gentleman from HP Labs who was so nice to do the video was David Warren.

(Here are my other videos from Interop, too, on YouTube. )

After my demonstration of the at HP Labs I made my way over to see my friends at Arista Networks. I met with Jayshree Ullal (right) and Andy Bechtolsheim (left) both of whom are in the picture below. It is very interesting how well Arista Networks is doing, especially when considering the competition: Cisco and HP. The company seems to be doing especially well with financial companies, they say.

I then went over to Cisco and had a good briefing. I was happy that they had some real-world demonstrations. I met with Marie Hattar,  the Vice President of Marketing, Borderless Networks for Cisco. Since I get a yearly picture with Jayshree, Maria and I took a picture, too. (I'm not going to say how many shots we took before we got a good one.)

It was nice to see Cisco's new video demonstrations for digital signage and also the UCS. I did get to see the new Cius is action. It's a decent product but I think it will be a hard sell with a 3g or 4g carrier network. Using the video you would tap out your data package very easily.

Cisco was a pleasure to talk to -- they made sure I had everything I needed. But when asked about the HP Media Briefing and how they compared the against the 6509, I got a great reply from Hattar. I won't repeat it verbatim, but she said that HP picks on a old piece of gear and if you put HP up against a new piece of Cisco gear and Cisco would win. I pressed them on the 6509 as many companies are needing to refresh them and all I got was a smile from Hattar. She did say "See you at Cisco Live." I told her that last year it was an Invitation Only Event and I, along with many others, were not invited. She said she would fix that, so we will see.

I finally made it over to Extreme Networks to see this switch I heard about. It was impressive that a Spirent was used for testing and that they had 192 ports all running at 40 gig. It was running at the max that it could go and below are links to the pictures to prove it. I was told a it would be priced abotu $4000 per port and that’s list price, but we'll see, the official price hasn't been released yet. Imagine this Extreme Switch with the HP Optical Backplane? That would be impressive.

Picture of Extreme Switch here, http://twitpic.com/4wr04r/full  http://twitpic.com/4wtha9/full

I had a very nice lunch briefing with the Vyatta team, then made my way over to Axis to see their line of video surveillance solutions and cameras. They had one that goes on top of your rack in the data center to protect from unauthorized users getting in to the rack, that is very cool.

Picture here of Axis   http://twitpic.com/4wqzq7/full 

To end the night I had dinner with my two friends from Riverbed Josh and Bob, both have been doing the presentations all day for the people at Interop. It was a good dinner and drinks at Aria.

Picture of Riverbed here http://twitpic.com/4wneh7/full 

I would like to say thank you to the women in the media center, Natalia Wodecki and Joylyn Tanner.

I sat through so many presentations and will soon post my winner of the Larry Awards for Best Presentations. (It seems to be catching on as many see me watching or coming and things change a little.)

• Cisco
• Data Center
• LANs / WANs
• LAN & WAN
• Arista Networks
• Extreme Networks
• HP
• Interop
• networking hardware
• optical backplane
• switches