News From Interop: Page 3 of 3

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.