Recently TMC's Group Editorial Director, Erik Linask, had a chance to visit Las Vegas, win his mortgage payments for the upcoming year and talk with Infoblox's Greg Ness, VP of Marketing.

The company automates network infrastructures, Ness said. "Generally when people think of infrastructure, they think of switches and routers, which every three to five years goes to a refresh. What we automate is the core network services of that infrastructure."

Ness noted that the great irony is that while networks were out automating business services, "the very way that the networks were managed, at the core infrastructure, hasn't fundamentally changed for decades. So while network engineers, network pros helped to build supply chains, real-time manufacturing, they're managing the networks the same way they did decades ago."

Infoblox "is about boosting the availability of networks, decreasing the cost, increasing the flexibility," at a time when management costs are rising.

As networks get larger and more complex, he said, the cost of managing each individual unit gets larger. "We're all about reducing that cost," he said, and "increasing the availability of the network by reducing errors," and allowing the network pros to manage larger networks. "We look at the IP address space."

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas recently, TMC's Erik Linask interviewed Alan Ugolini from Corning Cable Systems, about some of the things companies looking to deploy optical products in their data centers should think about.

Ugolini said it starts in the design phases. "You want to review the applicable standards," he said. "One of them out there now that is very good to review is the TIA 942 standard. Not only does it talk about your cabling infrastructure, your physical layer, it also gives you great advice on facility planning and networking."

He mentioned other standards our there which companies might want to review as well. Doing so, he stressed, "gives you a good foundation and good understanding of baseline techniques and methods to employ inside your data center."

Linask then asked what impact the soon-to-be-ratified IEEE standards for 40 and 100 gigabyte would have on the cabling industry. Ugolini replied that there is something he does think is going to catch some people - "copper UTP is not included in the standards."

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's Erik Linask found time to talk with Dennis Crespo, Executive Vice President from Display Link. Noting that "pretty much every computer manufacturer out there" has a Display Link product, Linask invited Crespo to tell more about the company.

"Display Link is a technology manufacturer," Crespo said, adding that the company makes software and silicon technology to remote graphics over Ethernet, Wi-Fi or USB. "We can take full HD graphics and put it out on a remote screen and also have a fully interactive back channel."

The way they do that, Crespo explained, is "we have virtual graphics software that runs on the PC side, that takes your CPU and GPU resources, and creates a virtual session for each screen or client.

He brought a couple products to the interview to demonstrate, one of them an HP zero client, which works with the new Microsoft MultiPoint Server 2010 software. It adds a mouse, keyboard and audio in and out, and full display to a zero client.

"You can put up to ten of these in just one Microsoft MultiPoint server," he said, adding that each of the displays has different content, different login sessions - "and each of these is only 89 dollars."

Recently, at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani interviewed Shoulin Chua, Business Development Manager for Amax.

Chua noted that Amax is an ISO 9001-certified company, with one division dedicated to OEM appliance manufacturing, "where we build appliances for companies like McAfee and Cisco," including design, prototyping and manufacturing, putting their software on it and inventorying and drop-shipping it worldwide.

The other division is high-performance computing, Chua said, where they build servers, storage and cluster products, for companies in the cluster storage industry, video surveillance industries. "We build best-of-breed, open architecture systems," he noted.

When asked what changes he'd seen in the market over the past few years, Chua said in terms of the high-performance computing market, he's seen a growth of high-performance computing, parallel computing. "For example, the growth of GPU, cards and systems, has been phenomenal." He said that for some cards, "you're able to have 240 cores, just in one card."

The Register has taken a look at Google's teaming with "DNS maven Neustar to propose an extension to the net's existing Domain Name System protocol, hoping to improve the way the protocol maps web users to particular data centers."

Sounds like a worthy goal.

About a month ago Google entered the DNS resolution business with its free Google Public DNS service.

As The Register noted, Google and Neustar "posted their proposed DNS extension to the dnsext mailing list , and other DNS providers -- including conspicuous Google rival OpenDNS -- are named as contributors to the proposal."

In March TMC's Group Managing Editor Michael Dinan caught up with Sean Leach of Neustar to talk about the DNS Real-Time Directory.