IT conferences and events

Vyatta more than just open source routing

Since I first encountered Vyatta two years ago, they have grown beyond merely being an open source software router. These days, Vyatta is calling itself an “open-source networking” company, and their router is now a router/firewall/VPN.

Dave Roberts, Vyatta’s VP of Strategy, spoke on a panel session called “Open source networking: An insanely smart idea?” at Interop Las Vegas 2008. I asked Dave whether open source networking was making any progress against the common arguments against its use in businesses, such as companies wanting the assurance of “one (vendor’s) throat to choke” should they have problems with the technology. Dave says that issue is “exactly the problem Vyatta was created to solve,” and said that they wanted to bring together all the disparate open source parts to become the “Red Hat of the networking industry.”

In this video, Dave talks a little bit about where Vyatta is now, some of the company’s recent price/performance successes, and new features they’re offering.

Perfect storm on its way for networking pros?

I flew back from Interop this morning, and my head is swimming from all there was to see and try to comprehend. One thing, however, is crystal clear: Today, networking is about a lot more than the network. When the hot topics at networking’s biggest conference are virtualization, application performance and green computing, it’s probably wise to start looking into new realms of technology, even if your current position doesn’t require it. Thing are bound to change quickly, and you may be in for more than you bargained for.

Dr. Jim Metzler warned attendees during the “Managing and Controlling Application Performance” session on Tuesday that in the next five years the combination of application acceleration, virtualization, and service oriented architecture will create a perfect storm. He said the resulting complexity of technologies may be something we are unable to manage. That’s quite an unsettling thought, especially coming from Jim, who may be the most influential expert in network and applications management today.

Taking a brighter view, other experts and vendors referred to the network and its new role as the “application delivery network” and emphasized the need for IT professionals that understand all aspects of delivering applications from end to end. These new application delivery specialists are most likely to come from a networking background, they agreed, because they have the knowledge of the complex infrastructure already in place.

So is the glass half empty or half full? Or maybe we just need to build an ark to weather the perfect storm. As Burton Group analyst Eric Siegel quipped to me at the end of the Metzler session, “You know what my plan is? In five years, I’m just going to retire!” If only we could all do that…

• Be sure to check out more Interop news and insight on our special coverage page
• Shout out to network management compadre Denise Dubie at Network World for her work with the aforementioned Eric Siegel on this useful guide to Assembling a ‘Network A-Team’

Motorola says that state of the enterprise WLAN market is strong

At the beginning of Interop this week, Motorola announced that North American investment plans in WLAN technology looks to be strong in 2008. The wireless technology vendor, which recently announced plans to spin off its ailing mobile devices business, sponsored a Web-based survey of 550 North American decision-makers about their WLAN spending plans.

You can see the survey results in this PDF file on Motorola’s web site. Indeed 56% of companies intend to increase their spending on WLAN technology over the next 12 months. Only 4% plan to cut their spending. This is surprising, given how shaky the economy is right now.

Motorola is showcasing its “all-wireless” enterprise concept at Interop this week. The company is demonstrating how its new line of mesh-enabled, 802.11n wireless LAN technologies and its high-powered point-to-point wireless technologies can be used to network a multi-location campus with wireless technology. Motorola appears to be one of the pioneers in this area. If the market for WLAN does stay strong, we could see some interesting deployments this year. I’m hoping to write up a case study or two on this soon.

What happens at Interop doesn’t stay in Vegas

Next week the SearchNetworking team will be reporting to you from Interop in Las Vegas. If my email inbox is any indication, there’s a lot going on at the show this year. I’ve received at least 500 emails over the last three weeks from vendors who desperately want me to tell you their stories.

There’s only so much ink in my pen, so you won’t hear all those stories. I apologize for that. But we’ll be bringing you as many interesting bits of news on this show as we can.

As a favor to you, our readers, we’ve reached out to some of the experts who will be speaking at Interop this year to get their insight on what to expect from the show. I caught up with Anne Skamarock, research director at Focus Consulting, who will be taking the stage several times to talk about virtualization. I asked her to tell us what to look for on the virtualization front at Interop.

Tessa Parmenter chatted with wireless networking expert Lisa Phifer about WLAN topics at Interop, Kate Dostart talked mobile apps and devices with Farpoint Group’s Craig Mathias, and Kara Gattine tracked down Burton Group’s Paul DeBeasi and picked his brain about enterprise wireless deployments.

We hope this whets your appetite for Interop news. We’ll be publishing news, blog posts and video from this show. Keep an eye on our Interop Las Vegas 2008 special news coverage page for all the news that’s fit to print.

Vint Cerf wows ‘em at SHARKFEST

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about the SHARKFEST conference, a small and focused networking event that features some very high-powered speakers, namely Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and protocol analysis expert Laura Chappell.

Tim O’Neill has posted a video and uploaded the slides of Vint Cerf’s presentation over at LoveMyTool, if you’d like to check them out. Vint’s talk covered Internet usage and growth in the 21st century so far, how technology and protocols are changing, what the drivers are behind that change, and how standards groups are working on adapting technology to meet future demands.

Laura Chappell has quite an extensive recap of SHARKFEST posted on her Inside Laura’s Lab blog. If you can make it through her entire post, you’ll truly feel like you were in attendance! Also stay tuned to SearchNetworking.com for more from Laura; she’ll be joining us soon for a virtual trade show on network monitoring. For now, click over to her latest animated article at Novell Connection Magazine. This one explains everything you need to know about TCP connection loss.

(Updated 4/8/08.)

SHARKFEST: Open source network analysis fans churn up the waters with the Father of the Internet and Mother of Invention

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the NOC….da, dum….da, dum….that’s when SHARKFEST sneaks up on you.

Actually, SHARKFEST is an event about protocol analysis, an activity we at SearchNetworking highly recommend to make you safer, in networking terms, at least. The use of protocol and network analyzers can not only root out problems in network performance but also discover all kinds of nasty security holes and potential vulnerabilities in your network. The conference is put on for developers and users of the open source network analyzer Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal). If you live or plan to be in the Mountain View, Calif., area this week, SHARKFEST will be held at Foothill College today through April 2.

What’s really exciting for the Wireshark folks is that the keynote speaker on Tuesday is Dr. Vinton Cerf, a man regarded by many as one of the Fathers of the Internet. Cerf now serves as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google (but, hey, we all have to eat, right?), chairman of the board of ICANN and honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum. According to the SHARKFEST agenda, Vint will be talking about “non-discriminatory network service.”

In a press release, Gerald Combs, Wireshark creator and director of open source projects at CACE Technologies, co-sponsor of the event, said, “Dr. Cerf’s presence at SHARKFEST ‘08 is an amazing testament to the importance of the open source movement and the Wireshark project.” I have to agree. Although Vint’s role at Google is “evangelist,” you don’t see him speaking often to IT audiences, so his presence is quite a coup. I hope the attendees think of some tough questions to challenge him.

So SHARKFEST has a lot going for it. 1.) It has a very cool name (despite the hyper-capitalization). 2.) It has the Father of the Internet. 3.) It has my all-time favorite IT speaker in the whole world: Laura Chappell. She’ll be giving sessions on trace file analysis, TCP/IP resolution processes, network forensics, cool security tools, and case studies about solving network performace issues with WireShark.

Laura is the founder of Wireshark University and the Protocol Analysis Institute. She has trained thousands of network and security administrators, saved hundreds of companies from ruin and embarrassment, and worked extensively with government agencies to safeguard networks and improve security measures.

If you have not seen Laura Chappell in action, you do not know what you’re missing. Not only is she funny and energetic and a riveting speaker, but she will show you things you can find out about your network that you never thought were possible. All with very simple, mostly free, tools. She’s so neat that Disney has optioned a script tentatively called “Mother of Invention” based on her life.

Cisco at VoiceCon Orlando 2008

Cisco has been relatively quiet at VoiceCon Orlando 2008. Well, they did make a bit of a splash today with a keynote address that featured CEO John Chambers and former vice president Al Gore discussing how communications technology can do its part to fight global climate change. I’ll have more on that later over at SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.

However, unlike many of the vendors here, both big and small, Cisco made no major announcements. Every other vendor here killed a small forest of trees to print out press releases about new products, new partnerships and new customer wins. Cisco was content to demonstrate some of its existing flagship technologies, such as telepresence.

While in Orlando this week, I did meet with Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions. He hinted at some news Cisco would be offering up later this year.

First of all, something is clearly brewing with WebEx, the online meeting technology that Cisco acquired last year.

“I’d say stay tuned to the WebEx space,” Cohen said. “When you look at our unified communications portfolio, our UC product stack, it’s about messaging, IP telephony, contact center, Cisco mobility. But its also about new video and visual products like telepresence and WebEx. You’ll see tighter integration between premise UC products and WebEx products.”

It sounds like Cisco is poised to integrate WebEx into its UC platform as some sort of collaboration space.

Cohen said something is also brewing with Securent, which Cisco bought last November. Securent is a policy engine, which has now been renamed Cisco Policy Manager. Cohen said Cisco will be making an announcement with Securent later this spring and he hinted that this announcement would help companies collaborate with each other.

“The question isn’t, can you and I send email or share files,” Cohen said. “The question is, can I enter your UC environment to collaborate with you and basically be a part of your business in a digital way? You need a policy that says you’re allowed from this hour to this hour to come into this part of my office digitally and see my information stream. Expect to see a lot more on this from us.”

It also sounds like Cisco is getting ready to make some noise in the social networking space by leveraging recent acquisitions such as Tribe.net and Five Across.

“What we see is when you take business unified communications and add social networking, you get collaboration,” Cohen said. “What we’re working on is making social networking safe and reliable for business. You’ll see a lot of that in our product direction. I think you’re going to see a larger vision of that.”

So Cisco has been somewhat quiet this week, but it sounds to me that they’ll be announcing some very interesting products later this year in the communications and collaboration area. Stay tuned.