Interop: Session Round-Up, 4/28

As mentioned in my previous blog, since we can't make all of the sessions ourselves, we have some reps out there doing the legwork for us, and we have a round-up from the yesterday's sessions by Jay Sumresh Bhansali, Ashutosh Tusharbhai Bhatt, Paridhi Nadarajan and Benson Mathews Poikayil.

Info Session: Planning and deploying 4G wireless
Panel member organizations: Ericsson, Sprint, Ixia, 3GAmericas
Description:  The panel discussed the much touted 4G cellular technology and its deployment status, especially in the US. The biggest carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint plan to jump on to the LTE bandwagon in the next two years. Sprint is the first market player to deploy 4G WiMAX solutions and has presence in more than 25 locations in the US. 

In the future, it is estimated that we would have more than 50 billion connected wireless devices and these devices will run applications that will be very bandwidth intensive. The cellular providers are now looking at using complementary solutions like femtocells, picocells and Wi-Fi data offloading to manage the increased traffic on their networks. The explosion in the number of devices will also lead to increased usage of the IPv6 standard for the wireless devices.

The 4G networks will also have increased security with IPSec and other tunneling mechanisms being used between the base station and switching center.  The panel wrapped up the discussion with some comments on the business value of 4G technologies, especially for providing seamless, ubiquitous connectivity to the mobile workforce.

Info Session:  Breakthrough network technologies:
Panel :
Martin Casado, Nicira networks
David Christophe, Alcatel-Lucent
Andy Gottlieb, Talari networks
Alex Henthorn-Iwane, Packet Design
In this session, a diverse panel discussed some of the breakthrough network technologies that promise to have an impact on the fundamental way of networking in the future.According to David Christophe of Alcatel-Lucent LTE and Green IT are some of the key technologies to look out for in the future. Some other breakthrough technologies that promise to speed up networks and increase network performance are technologies like WAN optimization and WAN virtualization. Core services like MPLS are increasingly gaining ground in the market.  The future will also see an evolution in terms of the way we analyze networks through tools such as route analytics which will allow you to see exactly how your packet traverses through the network, even through opaque networks such as MPLS. Other popular technologies to look out for are convergence and data center optimization, both of which are aggressively being promoted and developed by the industry.

Info Session: Mobile Security
Panel member organizations: Kaspersky, Trend Micro, RIM Blackberry, Symantec
Description:  The panelists from some of the biggest security solution providers and carriers discussed mobile security, especially application level security. The key stakeholders in the mobile security arena are application security providers and carriers who provide network security.

The five main points of failure are uncontrolled application downloads, poorly protected OS, poor protection against physical attacks, users having administrative privileges and poor encryption mechanisms. The panelists unanimously voted handset thefts as the biggest and gravest security issue for an enterprise environment and discussed some of the best practices to avoid the pitfalls of security threats.

Info Session: Virtualization management primer
In virtualization management primer session the President and Chief Analyst Barb Goldworm of the Focus Group talked about the key concepts of virtualization adoption for adaptation of server virtualization, desktop virtualization, application virtualization and storage virtualization in market.

Organizations who are migrating to virtualization will get benefits like maximum resource utilization, reduction of space/power and cooling, reduce TCO of servers, increased availability, improved disaster recovery, and server manageability. She also talked about state of virtualization from industry point of view as many industries who already implemented their 50 percent of server workload on virtualization and how will should take full potential of virtualization.The phases of virtualization have changed a lot in past few years as virtual infrastructure moving from dynamic to private cloud. To manage fully virtualized infrastructure organization should also focus on all aspects of virtualization management that includes VM lifecycle management, capacity management, performance management, storage management, data protection and security management. She also compared different features and technologies from Citrix, VMware and Microsoft as they are leading player in this industry.  Data recovery, data duplication, disaster recovery, capacity management and security are also key challenged in virtualization management when organizations need to take the full benefit of virtualization.