Looking ahead to Interop

Interop Las Vegas 2007 is almost upon us, and it looks like it will continue to act as the flagship trade show for the networking industry this year.

Network World has already published its guide to the show. We have a tradition here of requiring the "new" reporter to put together the guide (with some crucial input from the more experienced editors, of course), and once upon a time I, too, wrote a guide to Interop. This year, newcomer Jon Brodkin has done a great job in picking out the sessions worth seeing. However, I'd like to highlight some of those picks here as well for those interested specifically in LANs and routers.

The Ethernet Alliance will be demonstrating all the latest Ethernet technologies in its booth, including 10GBase-LRM (multimode fiber-optic 10 Gigabit Ethernet), 10GBase-T (copper-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet), 10GBase-KR (backplane Ethernet), and Power over Ethernet.

Brodkin mentions iLabs in his guide, and that's something you'll want to take advantage of. He writes that attendees have access to the engineers who volunteer to build the experimental network, so it can be interesting to see what they find. This year, Network World Lab Alliance partner Joel Snyder looks at NAC (he also has a presentation on NAC Wednesday), and David Newman looks at wireless LANs and VoIP.

Naturally, everyone should try to attend the keynote speeches; Cisco CEO John Chambers speaks on Tuesday, and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and Avaya CEO Louis D’Ambrosio speak Wednesday.

If you want to learn about the latest advancements in WLANs, there's a session entitled "Wi-Fi: The Revolution Continues" on Tuesday.

Newman talks about what he learned when testing WAN optimization products for Network World, and offers some advice, in a Tuesday session called "Testing WAN Optimization Products: What traffic mix should you bet on?"

Also on Tuesday: Dell'Oro Group's Seamus Crehan discusses the most important features of a convergence-ready Ethernet switch.

On Friday, there is an all-day workshop called "Network Troubleshooting Using Open Source Tools," which sounds like it would be worth your time investment.

Lastly, I have to give a shout-out to the Data Center Summit, which consists of 16 sessions over two days and will be run by the folks at Nemertes Research, who also happen to write our New Data Center Strategies newsletter.

For Brodkin's more complete guide, please go here.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.