News round-up from Interop New York

A survey of the new products shown at this year's Interop New York placed the cloud right at the forefront of the networking industry.

Of course, many of them were actually applicable to any network, but the importance of cloud in driving network bandwidth and utilisation makes it a prime use-case.

Among the cloud-specific news was the highly secure Qloud storage service from Canadian developer I Think Security. This uses two-factor authentication, military-grade encryption, a secure client sandbox and data anonymisation to provide secure online document storage and sharing. 1GB of Qloud storage is free, with the option to buy more.

Blending into the cloud was Phantom Virtual Tap from NetOptics – a virtual device able to tap network traffic between VMs at the hypervisor level. For Interop, NetOptics not only tapped the 10Gig links feeding the show floor networks with internet connectivity, it also provided visibility into the virtual networks within the ESX stack that ran many of the Interop's services.

Also relevant to 10Gig-based cloud infrastructures was the Gigamon G-Secure-0216 inline traffic distribution switch. This can receive traffic to up to 10Gig and intelligently distribute it to up to eight 1Gig security tools such as IPS, firewall, DPI devices, NACs or web filters – these are tools that need to work inline, i.e. they need to sit in the data path.

Still on the monitoring front, Danish developer Napatech was showing its latest four-port 10Gig and single-port 40Gig network cards, designed to capture every frame on the network.

The company's VP of sales for the US, Nick Arraje, said the cards were designed for applications such as performance monitoring, network data recording and forensics. He said they typically sell to companies building specialist appliances and cost several times more than standard 10Gig NICs.

Last but definitely not least, a notable buzz phrase at this Interop was BYOD, or bring your own device. As described in his keynote speech by Sujai Hajela, the VP and general manager of Cisco's wireless networking unit, this is the growing trend for users to connect their own consumer-grade mobile devices to the work network – often via the cloud – and use them as business tools.

HP also banged the BYOD drum, announcing it had built mobile NAC into its IMC management suite.

Security specialist Watchguard used Interop to release an iOS client for IPSEC VPNs (virtual private networks). It said this would allow Watchguard users with iPhones and iPads to connect remotely and securely to their corporate network, from the likes of a public hotspot.