Interop Spells Opportunity

The CMP Media-sponsored show, which takes place April 30 through May 5 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, will host a range of speakers from Google, Avaya, IBM and AT&T, as well as a plethora of product announcements.

Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif., will be at Interop to show off its revamped 7200 router line, complete with new modules that promise performance improvements for aggregation of services such as security and VoIP from branch offices. The 7200 now scales up to OC-3/Gigabit Ethernet speeds. The 7200 VXR Network Processing Engine-G2 doubles its predecessor’s service performance, while the 7200 VXR VPN Service Adapter triples IPsec VPN service performance.

End users and channel partners are eligible for trade-in rebates on the modules, which make them an enticing upgrade option, said Ethan Simmons, partner at NetTeks Technology Consultants, a Boston-based solution provider.

“It comes at a good time because we’re seeing some Juniper resellers going after that base,” Simmons said. “Now you can’t just forklift and go with Juniper when Cisco is making it so attractive to keep the 7200s in place,” he added.

Citrix Systems, meanwhile, is expected to have a few surprises up its sleeve. News about its NetScaler 12000 Web traffic appliance is expected to break at Interop.

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix will also shed more light on its new desktop application streaming technology, code-named Tarpon. The new technology offers resellers an excellent opportunity to sell additional licenses and services and further develop their existing accounts, said John-Marc Clark, senior director of product marketing, Emerging Products Group, at Citrix.

Expand Networks, Roseland, N.J., for its part, plans to unveil Accelerator 7940, its latest data center appliance for application acceleration. The device offers 45 Mbytes of throughput and supports up to 200 remote sites and up to 1,000 users, combining WAN optimization, compression, quality of service, application delivery and Wide Area File Services capabilities.

It also includes six hot-swappable 500-Gbyte drives for a total of 3 Tbytes of storage capacity, full RAID redundancy and dual power supplies. Accelerator 7940 is scheduled to ship in the second quarter.

Vernier Networks plans to take the wraps off EdgeWall 8800, a network access control offering that companies can use to enforce user-based security policies on high-speed enterprise LANs.