For those of you who are going to Interop 2006 next week, it looks like one of the primary attractions - at least from my LAN-focused perspective - will be the Infrastructure & Services Conference.

Looking at the schedule, it seems there are several interesting sessions.

First, I have to highlight the sessions being moderated by fellow Network World newsletter authors. Andreas M. Antonopoulos writes our New Data Center Strategies newsletter, and he's moderating a panel called "Will Ethernet Win in the Data Center?" It features speakers from Voltaire, Solarflare Communications, Myricom, Cisco and Force10 Networks. They'll be talking about whether Ethernet, which has dominated so many different fields of networking, will also be able to best interconnect technologies like Myrinet and InfiniBand.

Meanwhile, Dennis Drogseth, longtime co-author of our Network/Systems Management newsletter, is moderating "Is Network Management Cool Again?" This panel will look at how vendors are starting to give management its due, rather than relegating it to an afterthought. Representatives from the Burton Group, IBM and CA will be speaking.

Plus, Wide Area Networking newsletter co-author Jim Metzler is moderating three panels on SOA and Web services.

Network World has always made a habit of asking the venture capital community where they see the next big networking thing, and that's the spirit behind another panel, " Follow the Money Trail: What Networking Trends Do Investors Believe In?" (Yes, most of the session titles are in the form of a question.) That's moderated by Dell'Oro Group founder Tam Dell'Oro and features three venture capitalists.

Another discussion that looks interesting is "Open Source Networking: Should the Networking Giants Be Worried?" Certainly, the idea of using open source software in network equipment has come to the forefront with the emergence of Vyatta, which is represented on the panel along with IT Groundwork, University College London and iNOC.

A more comprehensive guide to what to see and do at Interop can be found here.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.