Data Center Top Of Mind At Interop 2010

Our intrepid Syracuse graduates students Harshit Kapoor, Anirudh Nagesh, Shruti Worlikar, Lingwen Zzhang  returned with more reports from Interop. Cloud computing and data center are top of mind for organizations and there was no shortage sessions dedicated to dusting out the corners. But let's not forget that there is more to IT than the data center. Mobile applications are becoming key IT innovations.

Thursday morning's keynotes were Dario Zamarian from Dell and Dave Crespi from Emulex speaking on data center issues. Zamarian introduced the requirements for new data center as having intelligent and simplified management as well as infrastructure. Server, storage, networking and management need to adapt to the change in today's IT environment. He went on to say that building a next-generation data center is not only a technical issue, but also a management issue. David Crespi discussed several trends driven by cloud computing: deployment of new servers, emergence of the X86 market, cloud-optimized networking and a fatter core with thinner edge computing.

On the subject of IPv6, John Curran, President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), says IPv6 is no longer optional. He identified many of the challenges that IPv4 depletion presents to networks and the Internet community as a whole, and how organizations can prepare for these challenges. He said that, the 4.69 percent addresses that are available of the free pool IPv4 addresses will definitely run out by May 2011 and as such IPv6 must be adopted for continued Internet growth. Curran also pointed out that in order to adopt IPv6, upgrades will have to be made to operating systems, network management tools and other hardware such as routers and firewalls. Curran believes the Internet will run both IPv4 and IPv6 for many years.

Nathan Clevenger, Enterprise Editor, Smartphone Magazine, addressed the important aspects of mobile applications, competing mobile platforms, potential application architectures, and best practices for enterprise based mobile applications. He noted that mobile applications are moving towards consumer-centric from device-centric methodologies, and that consumers are given more freedom to push and pull applications. Many enterprise-based applications are replacing paper-based work, such as iPhone's 'Point of Sale' application, which is a barcode scanner and magnetic stripe reader. 'Hybrid development' is the most sought after and widely used application architecture to develop mobile applications. It gives the power to access platform-specific API's and UI and use HTML 5.0 and AJAX. Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms such as Antenna, Pyxis, Sybase, Sales force are being used rapidly to develop enterprise based mobile apps.

Panelists Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO, Altor Networks; Eric Chiu, President and CEO, HyTrust; and Tamar Newberger, VP of Marketing at Catbird discussed policy and compliance issues around cloud computing. Ben-Efraim suggested that security in networks should be hypervisor-based giving superior network security with minimal overhead. Eric Chiu discussed that HyTrust provides a virtual appliance that provides network-based unified access control, virtual infrastructure policy, and audit-quality logging for virtual infrastructure. Tamar Newberger discussed the compliances issues (such as FISMA and PCI) that are raised by virtualization. The panel noted that the top Concern in virtualization security is the potential for the hypervisor to create a single-point of entry into multiple machines.