Enlivened Interop also focuses on security, wireless.
LAS VEGAS – A smaller venue and larger turnout last week helped infuse Interop 2005 with long-absent excitement about the network industry.
The event drew 17,000 attendees and featured a ton of wireless and security products, as well as news that a second show – Interop Fall 2005 – will be coming in December to the Jacob Javits Center in New York.
Interop 2005 news roundup
Network World Survivor Las Vegas
Interop attendees on wireless security
NW Radio: Interop Day 1
NW Radio: Interop Day 2
The conference featured keynote addresses on back-to-back days by Cisco CEO John Chambers and his counterpart at rival Juniper. They laid out distinct paths users can choose when building secure, wired and wireless corporate networks: one-stop-shop vs. multi-vendor.
Chambers emphasized that businesses are looking for vendors to act as strategic partners, rather than buying individual, task-oriented products from a gang of companies. Products that can offer lots of things in one box, or a vendor with many different products that are co-developed and tied together, are preferable, he said.
“Very few customers buy technology anymore based on feeds and speeds and price,” Chambers said. When it comes to deploying infrastructure that’s secure and can handle voice, video and data, “your support cost for all those different pieces are going to be huge if they all come from different vendors.” Any savings will be lost on time and money spent trying to get products to work together, he added.
Kriens’ keynote took the opposite view. Juniper’s technology focus is solely on secure and fast network transaction processing, with multi-vendor partnerships for other areas of expertise, the CEO said.
“One of the claims I would not make is that we have all the answers,” Kriens said. “We don’t claim to do all things, but we claim to do some things that are really important, really well.”
However, Kriens did say industry conditions make it hard for smaller vendors to survive, citing his company’s own acquisition of two smaller players – Peribit Networks and RedLine Networks – last week. Kriens also emphasized Juniper’s Infranet and Enterprise Infranet initiatives, which look to build multi-vendor standards for securing the public and private business networks. To this end, he cited the partnership announcement last week with Avaya, where Juniper and Avaya will co-market and resell security and VoIP gear.
“People want open standards and to make choices,” he said. An example: “IP PBX decisions should not dictate your routing, switching and security decisions.”
Many users milling about on the Interop show floor said they were taking this multi-vendor approach to solve problems in some of the hottest technology areas: wireless, security, and convergence.
“I take a portfolio approach to choosing vendors,” said Irving Tyler, vice president and CIO of Quaker Chemical in Conshohocken, Pa. With a mix of gear from Avaya, Cisco and Perabit, he built a secure wide-area VoIP network that lets remote offices access centralized data centers and IP PBXs for voice.
“I look for vendors that have a robust technology and look for companies that are looking to grow with us and are in it for the long run,” he said. “We’re looking for companies that are hungry enough that they’re willing to help us with more than just closing a sale.”
The days of making different vendors’ switches or routers or other basic infrastructure gear work together are mostly done, as many companies standardize on one vendor for routing and switching infrastructure. But particularly in the area of locking down wireless LANs (WLAN), users at Interop were more open to shopping around for ways to make the airwaves safe for network traffic inside and outside of corporate and governmental office buildings.
For Mike Mataraza, expanding his wireless network at Parkview Health in Fort Wayne, Ind., depends on the availability of better bandwidth management capabilities, but security features are his main concern. A Nortel customer, Mataraza came to Interop to check out competing products from Cisco, Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks.
“We have a few wireless hot spots, but we are looking to expand our wireless throughout the hospital, and I have to be sure I can secure the internal network,” he says.
Others have been holding off on wireless rollouts because of a lack of appropriate security tools.
“We are waiting to find technology that can scan hardware and make sure it complies with our parameters before it is let onto our network,” says Kevin Lemaster, technology coordinator at Lemoore Union High School in California. “Being a school, we need to be sure we can keep the wrong people out before we get into wireless.”
Some attendees shopping for WLAN gear say they aren’t even going to dabble in the technology until a vendor proves it can be secured.
“We have no wireless because I am looking for security products that can address multiple areas like prevention, detection, rogue access points, firewalls and basically anything that can protect the enterprise network from wireless security risks,” said Roberto Suarez, an engineer for the U.S. Army at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.
For users ready to pull the trigger on network buying decisions, the show floor had plenty of new gear from which to choose – from high-performance switching, network management integrated security and wireless gear, to applications and services.
Foundry kicked off the week of product announcements with updates to its 10G Ethernet switch portfolio – the BigIron RX switch family. The product family includes three chassis with four redundant switch fabrics, which can scale to a total of 1.5T bit/sec, with support for up to 192 10G Ethernet ports, 768 Gigabit ports or a mix of speeds.
“We’re pleased with the uptake in 10 Gig,” said Foundry CEO Bobby Johnson. “It’s not Mr. Small Businessman [looking at 10G], but it’s clustered computing applications, Internet exchanges as well as big corporate, university and government backbones. And already, I’m being asked what’s beyond 10G. And that’s no joke.”
Even Foundry, long focused more on pure speed and performance, outlined an entrée into the security realm. Johnson also hinted at Foundry’s upcoming security strategy, which will involve new products based on the company’s deep-packet-inspection technology, such as Layer 4-7 switching.
“We’re not announcing any security products here, but stay tuned over the next 30 days,” Johnson said. “There will be some specific, homegrown security products coming from us that add value to [customer’s] existing security infrastructure, doing things it doesn’t do well. And over time, migrating customers off of an existing security infrastructure to Foundry.”
Cisco’s security addition
Also on the security front, Cisco introduced its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500, which consolidated PIX firewalls, Cisco VPN 3000 concentrators and IDS 4200 appliances into one device.
“You don’t have to log in and out of firewalls and IDS devices [and VPN gear]. You’re dealing with just one device,” says Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco’s Security and Technology Group.
Cisco said the ASA 5500 can integrate into a current PIX, VPN Concentrator or IDS appliance, because each service is built on chunks of code taken from the respective point product. Eventually, Cisco customers could migrate away from multiple boxes and deploy only ASAs at the network edge and in data centers.
The ASA 5500 series ranges from $3,500 to $17,000, and can operate at speeds from 300M to 650M bit/sec. Cisco also launched a new appliance that lets users track the location of WLAN clients and devices, with its Wireless Location Appliance 2700, based on technology from Airespace.
Also at the show, Expand Networks announced a new version of its ExpandView management software, which lets network managers administer, configure and collect data from distributed acceleration appliances. Version 3 includes a mapping feature that provides a topology of all the Expand Accelerator appliances at remote and branch offices. ExpandView is installed on dedicated Windows servers and the appliances send application traffic statistics to the software, which now can provide trend reports on historical data. ExpandView 3 costs between $5,000 and $45,000.
Extreme rolled out the next wave of its XOS, modular-operating system switches at the show with the Summit X450, a fixed-configured box with 24 10/100/1000M bit/sec ports, which can communicate with an XOS-based BlackDiamond switch. With switches on this common operating system in the core and edge, Extreme said the devices can self-configure, provision and react to threats by adjusting QoS, access control lists and other settings on the fly. A language using XML-based messages is the medium that two XOS switches talk to each other, Extreme said. Pricing was not released.
