The Best Of Interop

While the battle of Cisco and HP is unfolding across the switch and server markets, smaller and more nimble vendors are making headlines. Arista Networks impressively claimed the 2010 Best of Interop Grand Prize Winner for their progress and ingenuity with the 7500 gateway switch system and won infrastructure category show award for low latency, low power, compact 10G 7500 modular switch that supports both 10GBase-T and SFP+ with QSFP for uplinks. The 384-port switch demo at Interop was populated with optical interfaces only, as the pure weight and size of Cat6 cabling required is prohibitive. We will be discussing further the importance of this direction in our upcoming state of the industry report.

Mellanox Technologies was also awarded the Best of Interop 2010 winner in the data center server and storage category for their adapter card BridgeX BX5020, that supports a mix of Infiniband, Ethernet, FCoE and Fibre Channel, allowing fabric convergence for computing, networking and storage traffic, which may prove to be a prudent move. After all, Interop is all about the end users who have to keep the network running smoothly, no matter which technology comes in and out of favor.

August 3, 2011

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