10 Nifty Networking Products To Check Out Right Now

Big City Bust-Outs

Interop New York is an annual fall showcase for the latest and greatest in networking, security, data center and cloud products. CRN was on the scene at the Javits Center earlier this month, and scoured the event for the most interesting networking and infrastructure wares. Here's a look at what we found.

Cisco Wide Area Application Services

Cisco launched new appliances under Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), the networking titan's WAN optimization line. According to Cisco, the appliances can enable 150,000 employees to simultaneously use virtual desktops over tablets, as well as dramatically cut down the time it takes to download a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, from 30 seconds to a single second. The new WAAS appliances can also simultaneously stream 400 HD videos to 150,000 devices, as well as add, through an update to Cisco's WAAS software, application intelligence to its data redundancy elimination (DRE) technology. There are six in all: the 294 and 594, which target branch offices, the 694, which straddles mid-sized and large office needs, and the 7541, 7571 and 8541 appliances, covering large branch offices and data centers.

HP FlexNetwork

FlexNetwork is the converged networking and data center architecture HP unveiled earlier this year, and at Interop New York, HP added to its growing FlexNetwork portfolio. Among its new wares are the HP 5900 top-of-rack switch that offers 48 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports, an updated version of the HP 12500 data center core switch that can boost server-to-server traffic as much as 80 percent. There are also new HP 3800 stackable switches, which includes PoE+ technology, and virtualized services modules for HP's 5400zl and 8200zl switches for branch offices.

Huawei Telepresence

Interop New York doubled as a U.S. coming-out party for Huawei, the $28 billion Chinese telecom and networking infrastructure giant that recently began to attack the U.S. enterprise networking market. According to Huawei's U.S. channel team, Huawei will offer its routers, switches and telepresence products through stateside-based partners, with a goal of selling those products 100 percent through the channel here. Its telepresence video products may offer one of the best options for U.S. VARs, providing support for H.235 signaling and media streaming encryption, E2E network-wide services signaling, various management tools and other options.

Xirrus XR-Series

Wireless networking specialist Xirrus is another vendor starting to make inroads in a crowded channel. At Interop New York, Xirrus launched its XR-series Wireless Arrays, what the vendor calls the industry's first modular, chassis-based wireless switching portfolio, plus a new version, 6.0, of the Xirrus Management System for wireless. The new XR-series includes a radio-upgradeable platform capable of upgrading from 54 Mbps to 300 Mbps to 450 Mbps, and support for up to 16 internal and 16 external radios per array.

snom IP Phones

IP telephony specialist snom was showing off its latest IP phones at Interop New York: three different phones qualified for use with Microsoft Lync. They include the 821 UC edition, the 300 UC edition, and the UC600, the latter for use with the Lync soft client. Each offer a range of IP telephony features from PC call commands and support for multiple SIP and/or Lync accounts. Snom said it plans to update all of its business IP phones with a new edition, the UC Edition, of snom firmware, meaning the whole portfolio will be optimized for use with Lync.

Radvision Scopia Mobile v3

Perhaps best known in the channel for its various OEM relationships, Radvision in the last few years has branched out into video endpoints, infrastructure tools and more recently, mobile video solutions. At Interop New York, Radvision showed off Scopia Mobile v3, a mobile video application to enable HD videoconferencing on Apple iOS devices. For Radvision, the product takes advantage of the BYOD trend and also lets Radvision solution provider partners broaden their mobility strategies and create drag for other Radvision video products. The Scopia Mobile interface lets user see up to 28 participants simultaneously, and can connect telepresence systems and standards-based HD video conferencing and UC systems.

Brocade Network Subscription

Brocade was at Interop New York showing off what many of its networking and data center partners think is a novel idea: subscription pricing for data center products that allows customers to customize what and how they buy the networking compute products. Under the Brocade Network Subscription program, Brocade customers pay for their infrastructure on a monthly basis, and can adjust how they acquire that infrastructure as their network capacity expands or shrinks. The program is available for all Brocade IP/Ethernet products, including Brocade's VDX family of data center switches, including the recently released VDX 6730 (pictured), a 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch that can bridge Brocade Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) Ethernet fabrics to Fibre Channel SAN fabrics.

Desinnova Intuition Control

Not only are videoconferencing technologies important to customers these days, but also the many infrastructure and control products needed to make them work seamlessly and comfortably. Desinnova Technologies, a two-year-old videoconferencing company based in Portland, Ore., offers video conferencing control software for managing the use of video on cameras, meeting rooms and conference-to-conference communications. Various versions of its Intuition Control software, for Polycom, Sony, LifeSize and Tandberg systems, are coming soon, and Intuition Control Solo for Wolfvision -- which makes A/V visualizers -- is already available.

Momentum

Service provider Momentum, which provides digital voice services and broadband management technologies, recently went live with a program for VARs and MSPs, to build upon the channel support it already has from wholesale partners. Like a number of service provider and telecom vendors seeking partnerships in the IT reseller and integrator channels, Momentum offers referral partnerships and resale partnerships for its cloud-based telephony services using a BroadSoft platform. The company itself is 10 years old and CLEC-certified in 45 states, managing over 100,000 digital voice lines for more than 350 independent operators. Momentum packages its various service plans with a range of Cisco and Polycom IP phones, including the Cisco SPA 303G (pictured).

Dell Force10 Portfolio

Dell earlier this year finally pulled the trigger on a long-awaited acquisition in the networking space, buying Force10 Networks. According to Dell, it'll explore a lot of the partnering possibilities in its new Force10 portfolio at Dell World this week, but at Interop New York, its executives were talking up a lot of the products and how they go hand-in-hand with Dell's broader storage and data center portfolios. Among the most notable products are the Dell Force10 Open Automation Switch Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, which Dell says provides deeper visibility into an enterprise's networking stack for closer monitoring of both physical and virtual IT assets.