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.
