Interop 2009 Day 1: Vendors, Vendors And More Vendors

Posted by Mike Fratto
November 19, 2009

One of the main reasons I come to shows it is to get some face time with people I have spoken with on the phone and then catch up with new vendors not yet on my radar. Yesterday, I spent the day in a room meeting a stream of vendors. It was like speed dating, but more fun. There are definitely some interesting products coming out of large and small vendors alike.

Enterasys

I started my day with Enterasys. Enterasys is one of those companies that has some very forward thinking technology that no one knows about. Network Access Control? Enterasys was doing that in 2001. Port profiles? They were doing that in 2002. Location based access control? Done. Integrating with external products for port control and traffic management? They did that too. Need to move a host from one location and subnet to another but don't want to split a subnet across data centers? They can automate that. On a technology basis, Enterasys can go head-to head with the rest of the infrastructure vendors. Perhaps Siemens Enterprise Networking  will give them a leg up.

Splunk

Next up was Splunk, the log reporting guys. They had a neat demo creating visualization graphs of the traffic hitting the Interop network, but the real strength of Splunk is the ability to consume and process log messages from nearly any source and then search, sort and generate reports. It's not as magical as it seems, at times you have to build out parsing language to get at the meat of the data in a log message, but once that work is done, Splunk makes reporting a snap. One area that they have traditionally been lacking is log management--cataloging, archiving and restoring. I don't know what has changed in 4.0, but I plan on finding out today on the floor.

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