Davis, Dean (DeanD@fishgame.state.ak.us)
12 May 98 08:57:00 KDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Hamje
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 1998 8:11 AM
To: deand; 'rhamje@cisco.com'
Subject: ***Cisco Interop Report
Folks,
Well, I'm back from Las Vegas and NetWorld+Interop. Having never been to
a big trade show before, I found it fascinating. Some observations on
this year's show---
There seemed to be four themes: VPN, Layer 3 Switching, DSL and Voice
Over. With few exceptions (test gear, software) every booth was one of
these four things and some had more than one. The VPN-related booths
generally were devoid of people, as were most of the DSL booths. The
only real crowds I saw were in the Layer 3 Switching presentations and
the Voice Over demonstrations.
In terms of cool stuff I would point to the following:
A company called NBX was showing a very nifty Ethernet telephone set with
its associated IP-based "PBX". The voice quality of this setup was
outstanding and the price is a real eye-opener.
A company called Starburst has a software product for doing "push" in a
logical fashion. It compresses data, selects times with slack network
demand, etc.
Cisco recently bought Class Data. I went by their booth and was very
impressed with their solution. Class has software that allows you to
selectively accelerate traffic based on application (e.g. SAP goes before
FTP) and/or user (e.g. Web traffic from user A is more important than Web
traffic from user B).
Two companies, Phobos and Zynx, offer 4 port 100MB PCI Ethernet cards
with support for Cisco Fast EtherChannel. Thus you only use one slot for
an 800MB connection to a server. Of the two, Phobos seemed better.
Motorola had the coolest booth in the show with the Digital Diner. This
was a complete replica of a 50's diner. The waitresses seated you at
tables with menus and then gave you the pitch for Motorola. Very
creative and very popular.
Booths drawing big crowds were Cisco, 3Com, Bay, Lucent, Microsoft, and
Digi. Novell had a very large presence and tried hard to make the point
that Netware 5 is native IP. Big booths with smaller crowds were
Cabletron (probably winner of the "Most Elaborate Booth" award), Digital,
Sun. The StartUp Alley section was a real disappointment, with nothing
really new, cool or even interesting.
That's the snapshot. If you're looking for details on anything here, or
anything else you may have heard of, give me a call or drop a line.
Thanks!
Richard
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Richard Hamje (907) 279-9987
Account Manager fax: (907) 279-9337
Cisco Systems (Alaska) rhamje@cisco.com
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sat Oct 17 1998 - 17:44:43 AKDT