Extreme builds backbone of new Interop

This week Interop will have its inaugural event in New York City. While the location is new, the network supporting the show will once again come from Extreme Networks.

This network, called the InteropNet, will support voice, video and data for the power-user exhibitors. As usual, the LAN is a bit of overkill for what might be needed for the number of users and applications - but InteropNet is a showcase, and it would be highly embarrassing if the network for a networking show had major issues.

Extreme bills InteropNet as “the industry's dream network.” It’s made up of the company’s BlackDiamond 10K core switches, which were built to support a high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure, and Summit 400 edge switches.

The edge switches provide Power over Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet on every port. The Power over Ethernet means that demonstrators can run wireless access points or IP phones by plugging them directly into the network with a single cable.

To ensure that the network avoids availability problems, Extreme is using its Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) protocol. The company says that by using EAPS it can configure Ethernet networks in a ring topology, and it can get sub-50-millisecond recovery from any failures.

Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to get to this Interop show. For those of you in a similar situation, you can get a preview of what’s going on there from our story and can get more Interop news throughout the week at the NetFlash news page.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.