At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Steve Brown, Product Manager at Network Instruments.

As the name might suggest, the company makes products that help with network testing, and otherwise deal with network or application issues, Brown says, including performance issues.

Network Instruments' approach is to monitor networks, and alert its owners before any serious issues crop up, Brown said, especially before it might impact the end user; "For example, if you notice that e-mail is down, ideally you would notice that before the end user would be impacted, and with the same tool, be able to solve that issue."

Brown also made a news announcement at the show, revealing that as part of their observer platform, the performance management platform, "we've announced a dashboard-level view designed to provide that view of your critical applications, and in particular cloud-based applications." He gave examples of "things like Salesforce, or understanding what the performance of any other cloud-based application might be."

Read more here.

...

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Anue Systems' Vice President of Marketing, John Delfeld.

Located in Austin, Texas, Anue (pronounced uh-NOO-ee) sells visibility tools, products "that help companies have visibility into their networks," Delfeld said. "In particular, we help companies monitor their data centers."

Tehrani asked what sort of information a client could get using Anue's systems. "We don't actually have the monitoring tool," Delfeld explained, "we help you use it more effectively. Typically, the problems our customers come to us with, the problems they have, there are typically a couple big ones."

First, he said, in their data center, they have all these different tools - security tools, data performance tools, "and to get coverage, they have to have these tools in many locations. And that's expensive and difficult to manage. That's one key problem we address," reducing the cost and complexity of management.

Read more here.

...

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Lancope's CFO and Head of Corporate Development, David Cocchiara. The company works in NetFlow collection and analysis, saying they use the analysis to provide "global visibility for large enterprises worldwide."

This means they allow clients "end to end" visibility into their networks, "whether it's virtual, physical, remote locations, all the new things you're seeing at the show here, all the convergence you're seeing in networks today, all the different technologies, or different arrangements of the network, we're able to provide monitoring and management, and complete visibility over all of those."

Lancope can monitor traffic on VPN networks, they can "monitor VPN connections, or on virtual. We started doing a lot of physical, we can monitor routers and switches, monitor the behavior of users, monitor the behavior of network interfaces, and the typical activity."

Read more here.

...

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Aprius's Craig Thompson, VP Product Marketing. A relatively new company, they're developing technology designed to address what Thompson called "a growing problem in the modern data center related to I/O bottlenecks, or I/O constraints."

Most people refer to this area as "I/O virtualization," Thompson said. "It is an emerging area, the basic concept being to apply the principles of virtualization to all of those network and storage connections a server normally would use."

Tehrani asked what are some of the benefits a busy data center could see from "going down the I/O virtualization path. Thompson said there are some major points to consider.

"First and foremost, a modern virtualized data center has a much different workload profile than data centers in the past. Virtual machines can now reside on any physical server, anywhere in the data center, and that's resulted in variable and peak work loads, that can be moved around within the data center."

Read more here.

...

At the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Netronome's Daniel Proch, Director of Product Management. "We're a small startup, of about a hundred people," he said, developing a line of programmable semiconductor products for network flow processing." They're used in devices that need intelligent flow processing, "unlike what you would consider a general-purpose CPU."

The intellectual property the company maintains is the NFP 3240, a security-optimized microprocessor: "It legitimately is a 40 gigabyte-per-second NPU," he said. "From that line of NPU products, we also build a family of acceleration cards based on the network flow processor," as well as full systems that scale up to 100 gigabytes per second.

When asked how their technology differs from some of the others on the market, Proch reiterated that "We're not a general purpose processing core. The device is heavily optimized around packet processing, flow processing, as well as security, with cryptography, and PKI. So you wouldn't use it as a general purpose processor."

Read more here.