Interop 2010 News Roundup

There's a lot of news coming out of Interop this week. Here are highlights of a few interesting announcements. The first comes from Gale Technologies. The company announced its GaleForce software on Tuesday. GaleForce is orchestration software that lets enterprises and service providers build templates of virtual and physical servers, application software, network resources and storage. Business units can then choose from among these templates to quickly access and deploy software and hardware resources for test/dev labs and production applications. Resources are allocated automatically, speeding the provisioning and deployment of applications.

Of course, before companies can use the orchestration software, they have to have a comprehensive understanding of the assets available to them. Gale Technologies says a professional services engagement is usually the first step. The software package includes a discovery tool to find and identify assets, and also includes a CMDB-like inventory asset management system to track physical and virtual assets. The other key component is the modeling system that lets IT use graphical tools to model the templates that customers can deploy. The system can set a time limit on how long these resources are available, for example, a period of months. If the customer opts not to extend its use of the resources, they are automatically returned to the pool. The company says an initial deployment typically starts around $100,000 to $150,000 and will scale based on the number of assets.

In other news, Verizon Business has announced that it is adding Riverbed to its managed WAN optimization services portfolio. Verizon will deploy, manage and tune Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization appliances for customers. Verizon is also launching new professional service options for WAN optimization, including a service that lets customers "test drive" a WAN optimization product--Riverbed or otherwise--before committing to it. Verizon will bring hardware to the customer's site, set up and deploy it, and let it run in the customer's production network. Verizon lets the appliance run for a couple of weeks and then evaluate the results. For organizations that aren't customers of the managed WAN optimization service, Verizon also announced that it can send teams on site, on demand, to help organizations tune their WAN optimization product to ensure they get the best performance possible.

Another interesting announcement comes from ExtraHop Networks. This start-up, founded by F5 veterans, offers a passive network appliance to monitor business-critical applications. The company claims its appliance can monitor and analyze up to 10Gbps of application traffic in real time. At Interop, the company has announced a free Web service, called Network Timeout, that lets organizations test the product's analysis engine. Potential customers can upload up to 30Mb of packet captures to Network Timeout and run the company's analysis engine against them. "Seeing is believing," says founder and CEO Jesse Rothstein. "We let customers analyze their own production traffic to see what we're capable of."

Finally, Kerio Technologies, maker of messaging and security products, announced that its Kerio Connect 7 messaging server now supports Apple's iPad. Kerio Connect users can access e-mail, calendars and contacts on their iPads. Kerio Connect supports Exchange ActiveSync, as well as CalDAV to let users access shared calendars. Note that Kerio Connect, which starts at $450 for five users, costs less than a single iPad, which starts at $499.