Interoperability – How Networking Should Be

May 13th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Remember when Interop was Networld+Interop? Somewhere along the way, it lost the Networld and has clearly embraced the interoperability focus, and nowhere was this more apparent than in InteropNet – the show network project which brought together 17 vendors to make the largest temporary network in the world.

The lofty goals: Vendors working together in a very abbreviated timetable to make sure that their solutions 1) worked 2) got fully deployed to support the show network goals and 3) talked to each other so that the sum of the parts added up to much more than the individual solutions.

It’s a heterogeneous world. We see it all the time, and it shows in our products. We talk about being vendor neutral – so whether you’re using Cisco (probably), Juniper, Foundry, Enterasys (and the list goes on), EM7 can provide fault and performance monitoring for all of it. Agents, no agents – we don’t care as long as there’s some way to communicate with each other (XML, SOAP, SNMP, SQL queries, logs, traps, emails…).

Louis will share a post later on a neat, real-world and real-time wireless security solution that took EM7, Enterasys and Aruba together to make happen. Using this, the InteropNet NOC team could literally find network/security offenders even if they were hiding under a desk somewhere on the show floor.

InteropNet – we loved it. We’re probably a bit biased because having everything connected and able to talk to each other is at the heart of what we do. But there was truly a sense of people wanting to help each other out – vendors, show organizers, and of course volunteers – that made InteropNet a great team experience and a lovely microcosm example of how networking should be.

And all this is not even going into Interop’s ILabs – which had some very cool, vendor-agnostic projects around NAC and UCM. Gerard from Cisco (who I met in the casino lounge – hey it’s Vegas) gave me a tour and showed off the Cisco wireless management software.

There’s just a couple of months off and then this process starts again for Interop NY. Will New York be different? Well, for one thing, we won’t be stranded in a desert with too much to drink.

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May 13th, 2008