Interop 2008 -- less circus, more substance. The major themes revolved around data centers. Switching and virtualization were top of mind with announcements from Cisco, Extreme, and various software vendors supporting virtualization. Some interesting demos and road-mapped items were discussed as well.

I got the skinnny on Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect Metadata Access Point, IF-MAP specification, which I have already mentioned. It was interesting to hear Steve Hanna, co-chair of the TNC and Stu Bailey, co-editor of IF-MAP, discuss not only the reasons behind the design of IF-MAP, but also the larger-use cases. I hope we will start seeing the standard show up outside of NAC.

Riverbed didn't have any news, but it is, in some sense, leading the charge for branch consolidation by offering virtualized hosts on its RSP platform aimed at critical services like DHCP and DNS. While only a few partners have been announced, I bet we will see more. Combined with the WAN optimization on the Steelheads, you get the benefits of branch and data center consolidation along with the benefits branch survivability.

Extreme Networks X-650 is a top of rack or end of row 1U, 24-port 10-GB switch that is stackable amongst itself along with the rest of Extreme's switch line. Using a custom cable, the X650's can be stacked with a 256-GB backplane. The models come in SFP for $19,995 or 10GBase-T which representatives said would be less than $1,000 per port.

Bay Microsystems and Yotta Yotta have teamed up to offer VMware VMotion moves across a WAN. VMotion is really designed to move running VM within a data center LAN. The requirement being both ESX servers share a single SAN. Yotta Yotta provides the block level SAN replication, what they call coherent caching, across the WAN. Bay Micro provides a high-speed, low-latency network and use Infiniband to move the running VM from one data center to another. In their demo, they claimed a 1,000 mile WAN was represented by a WAN with 5 ms one-way delay, which seems overly optimistic to me, they moved the VM in about 5 minutes with only a small disruption in processing at the end. My more practical colleagues asked why you would want to use VMotion between remote data centers and I didn't really have an answer, but heck, it's cool.

Juniper, like Riverbed, Cisco, and others, is starting to head down the branch consolidation path with ISM200 module which contains its WXC wan optimization product that runs within the J-Series router. Along with Junos 9, Juniper is trying to catch up in this space.

Lenovo announced a free management utility for their servers, desktop, and laptops that clips into its ThinkVantage line. It's a free utility that comes with any Lenovo computer and lets you run inventories, and kick-off updates. More generalized and robust computer management is through the integration with Avocent's LANDesk management suite. Lenovo also has an SDK that other management products can use to integrate ThinkVantage into their products.

Polycom showed off its line of VoIP and VoFI high- and low-end phones. Most impressive is the HD voice phones that use a special codec that recreates high-quality voice calls. Equally impressive was its demonstration of HD video conferencing showing emloyees' children playing Guitar Hero in their Texas offices. The smooth, high-quality frame rate demonstrates HD video is viable.

Blue Coat Systems didn't have any news, either, but I chatted them up about its Packeteer acquisition. Seems that it was most interested in a couple of things Packeteer had. First is the application-detection technology. Blue Coat does a lot with application acceleration, optimization, and security processing. Application detection is probably a good fit for them. They didn't have plans to move an application firewall like Palo Alto Networks, but didn’t rule it out, either. Also, Blue Coat wanted the channel sales force, which it couldn’t praise enough. It does plan to continue to support Packeteer's existing customers.

Solera Networks was demoing its DeepSee application , which it calls the Google of network traffic. The Packet Capture Appliance captures data and then DeepSee indexes the traffic payload, including attachments for 29 file formats. Administrators can search for keywords and phrases, similar to Web searching. In fact, searches can be automated and accessed through a CLI for scripting. If you have spent any time trying to troubleshoot network protocols using packet capture tools, you know how hard it can be to get the information you need. More interesting is that nontechnical users also can access the data without having to learn about capture, file formats, and the like. Certainly looked interesting and is pretty unique.

Citrix Systems is certainly upping the ante with automated provisioning of virtual machines using Xen. It was talking about using its NetScaler appliance to determine when application utilization was getting high, tickling its workflow application to tell Xen to provision a new computer for the application dynamically. Not only a cool example of automation, but useful for peak processing requirements. It's not shipping yet, but should be coming this year.

Napera's story is simplified NAP using its switch equipment and without the need to deploy and configure Windows Server 2008 and NAP. Aimed at the small- to medium-sized enterprise, or cheap larger enterprises, Napera's product is pretty simple to use. The management team has all worked for WatchGuard technologies, a company known for SME security products, at one time or another.

Ixia introduced IxGreen, a test suite that measures power consumption. While I'm not a green fanboi, IxGreen is certainly an interesting application because it can show how much power is drawn for different network utilizations. That information is certainly more useful for equipment vendors who want to measure power usage. But for companies looking to save money on power costs, measurements are just one more data point in purchasing network gear.

Anything virtual was hot, hot, hot. Too bad the buzz is more smoke and mirrors. Any monkey can slap a virtual appliance into a hypervisor and call the product virtual, but it's not. It's just one more computer on the network, albeit a virtual network. I will become interested in virtual software when vendors start integrating into the hypervisor using APIs. I think that's when the virtualization space will get interesting.