All the talk of green networking at has vendors running around Interop saying “Mine is smaller than yours,” when it comes to power consumption by their equipment.

That’s leading to a whole new way of looking at network hardware. Citrix introduced a new NetScaler box that is faster than any of its previous devices and consumes less power than their slower boxs.

Really? A faster box costs less to run?

Well not really. It burns less power when you consider how much it burns per megabit of throughput.

So remember to ask your vendors for the watts/bit/sec ratings before you buy any networking gear from now on.

It seems Cisco is trying to make its presence felt in NAC at Interop.

The company sponsored the all-day NAC seminar Monday and contributed heavily to the InteropNet NAC interoperability demonstration. It was the only vendor to have products in all of the major categories of NAC gear, client, server, enforcement and access data path.

Putting all that effort into the technology indicates the company thinks that NAC has a future. Which is optimistic in light of comments at the recent RSA conference that  NAC was dead.

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C.K. Prahalad delivered the keynote at Interop today.

Never heard of him?

He’s the #1 most influential management thinker in the world, according to the Times of London.

He used the kickoff-keynote platform to kickoff the U.S. release of his new book, The New Age of Innovation: Driving co-created value through global networks.

Interesting stuff if you’re in a graduate economics seminar, but he had a tough row to hoe vs. the likes off Cisco’s preacher/CEO John Chambers and other keynote regulars.

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Start-up City, the row of booths at Interop dedicated to newcomers in the networking industry, is featuring some fresh-faced and veteran residents this year. Web-based service desk vendor Blue Spinner is so new that one can't easily find their Web page through a Google search and optical burst swithcing vendor Matisse Netwroks is among the more experienced start-ups being founded in September 2003. Others like porttracker and FastSoft on the other hand seem to fall squarely into the start-up definition. Porttracker is a U.K. company founded in the past 18 months that can determine which devices are connected to the network for security and troubleshooting purposes. FastSoft accelerates video and large design files across long distances by using a single-sided appliance model.

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BlueCat Networks is hoping to drive the point home that now is the time for enterprise companies to upgrade their IP address management systems by equipping its Interop booth with a simulated golf driving game and by having, er, caddies on hand to help out show attendees improve their game. Booth workers of the female persuasion are donning a common uniform that is one part Catholic schoolgirl and one part old-time golfer. With argyle sweaters and socks, and mini-skirts asking passers-by "Who's your caddy?" BlueCat will draw Interop attendees to its display, but it's unclear if the vendor's message about automating IP address management with its Proteus appliances will be why they remember the vendor.

This year's InteropNet is nearly all virtual -- and network architect Geoff Horne worked hard to get it that way. The monster network that powers Interop features an almost totally virtualized server environment. Some vendors who donate equipment to the temporary network brought their own physical servers, but Horne turned them away. "If anyone had hardware we pretty much yanked it out and said 'no, you're going virtual," he says. Check out the full story here.

One of the knottiest problems with NAC technology remains how to get data about devices that can't run NAC clients such as phones and printers, panelists said in a sold-out Interop workshop devoted to NAC. The best way to deal with it is checking the behavior of devices continuously after they are admitted to the network to flag and block them when they stop acting like printers and phones. "If these devices do things they shouldn't, you need to know," said Brendan O'Connell, a senior product manager at Cisco who sat on the panel.

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Interop 2008 is happening this week, and Network World has the networking industry event covered from many different angles.

This year's Interop will also have security and software conferences running alongside it. In a nutshell, the organizers decided to expand the scope because they realize that networking doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that interoperability is an issue that cuts across various IT disciplines. Read more .