Networking solutions showcase at Interop 2007

At this week's Interop show in New York, more than 200 companies including Microsoft, Siemens and Verizon Business will showcase their technologies. Plenty of announcements, mostly focused on making networks faster, safer and more efficient, are also on tap.

What follows is a preview of networking-related news to be announced at the show that starts today.

After several acquisitions, Fluke Networks is strengthening its performance-management offering by unveiling Visual Performance Manager, a new tool that will serve as the single view for network managers. The tool will let managers get maximum performance out of a network and make sure that voice and data applications don't experience hiccups. Fluke makes hardware and software for installation and maintenance of local and wide area networks.

All-in-one security, traffic management
Foundry Networks, a provider of routing and switching technologies, and Secure Computing, an enterprise gateway security provider, will announce the integration of Secure Computing's URL filtering tool into Foundry's SecureIron Perimeter Traffic Manager, an all-in-one security and traffic management appliance. As a result, customers will get an all-in-one switch and network security appliance for simpler installation and management.

Siemens Communications will unveil its HiPath OpenOffice ME, a unified communications appliance for small and midsize businesses with 20 to 150 employees. Unified communications is an emerging technology that links business processes with presence information, e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and video-conferencing to facilitate efficient communications. The appliance will include the Siemens OpenScape Office unified communications suite for presence awareness. It can be used with Siemens' HiPath Wireless C20 Controller, also to be unveiled at Interop, allowing businesses to choose whether they want their voice and data traffic to move through wireline connections or over a wireless network.

In a similar move to help smaller businesses with their network deployments, SYS Technologies, a provider of information connectivity tools that capture, analyze and present real-time information, will preview dopplerVUE, its large enterprise network management product that has been repackaged and priced for midsize and smaller networks.

.11n products
Xirrus, a manufacturer of Wi-Fi arrays, plans to announce several beta customers that are using its 802.11n-compatible product. It's a big deal because 802.11n is the long-awaited update to popular Wi-Fi standard 802.11a/b/g. Once it's ratified by the IEEE, 802.11n is expected to deliver four times the data throughput of existing standards and an improvement in range. Xirrus' 802.11a/g Wi-Fi array uses high-gain antennas and multiple radios to offer greater capacity, and it's upgradeable to 802.11n.

Enterprise mobility provider Agito Networks will unveil its RoamAnywhere Mobility Route, which uses RF-based, location-aware technologies to improve voice and data applications for mobile use. Businesses can use the router to make phone calls and access data over their WLANs inside buildings as an alternative to cellular networks.

Verizon Business, an enterprise-focused unit of telecom carrier Verizon Communications, will introduce an offering that will give its customers additional enterprise mobility options to keep business operations up and running from multiple global locations.

Interop will also play host to companies announcing products and initiatives that improve collaboration, whether in the enterprise or the tech community.

Microsoft will introduce the Who Are You Performance Lounge, an online community where IT professionals can step out of their day jobs and share their hobbies as entertainers, volunteers, comedians and artists.

Avistar, a provider of enterprise video communications, will introduce Avistar Hosted Video Services, a fully-managed desktop video service for a low monthly fee. This new service offers video communications and data-sharing capabilities without the need to install and manage a costly infrastructure.

'Defrag intelligence'
On the storage side, Diskeeper will launch Diskeeper 2008 with defragmentation intelligence that handles even the lowest 1 percent free space and the highest levels of fragmentation. DTS, meantime, will announce a new drive category with the Platinum hdd, which combines 1Gbyte of SDRAM and up to 160Gbyte of conventional storage.

On the data center side, Digital Tadpole will debut VirtuConnect, a new approach that allows an IT administrator to create and deploy virtual machines directly onto users' local networks with the reliability of fully redundant enterprise-class hardware.

Interop New York is part of four shows in one. It will be joined by the Mobile Business Expo, VoiceCon and OutsourceWorld.

- Elena Malykhina
InformationWeek

Keywords: Interop 2007   networking   hardware   unified communications   Wi-Fi