Reporter's notebook: Hidden gems of Interop

The Interop conference in New York this week featured the usual suspects talking about their newest offerings and the industry at large. The biggest buzz was about security; network access control in its various interpretations and incarnations dominated the show floor. Besides security, what else piqued the interest of conference goers? We informally polled attendees and vendors to uncover some quieter -- but no less innovative -- announcements and products.

Two-way, clientless Web acceleration

Stampede Technologies announced availability of Acceleration On Demand, a technology that enables enterprises to perform bi-directional application acceleration and compression without the need to install hardware or software at remote locations. An add-on to Stampede's Application Acceleration Series, Acceleration On-Demand uses a two-sided architecture with a hardware appliance on one side and a software client on the other.

The client software is automatically "injected" into a Web page, providing full support for bi-directional acceleration of HTTP/HTTPS and TCP applications, as well as new Web 2.0 applications-based, service-oriented architectures and AJAX. In addition, the product offers application front-end services for firewalling, load balancing and server off-loading of TCP connection management and SSL processing. Several large customers with thousands of end users have been testing Acceleration On-Demand throughout the summer, and it is available now.

A clear view of video

ClearSight Networks launched version 6.0 of its ClearSight Network Analyzer. The new version of the product has "triple play" real-time monitoring that includes analysis of video and IPTV flows, allowing administrators to troubleshoot network resources that provide data, telephony and video. ClearSight's analyzer provides real-time information about the application, network and physical layers of the network with an intuitive graphical user interface. The tool incorporates patent-pending algorithms that measure the quality of video being delivered over the network. The new version will be available in mid-November 2006.

Product with potential -- and the coolest name

Endace Systems demonstrated its newly released Ninjabox, a platform for facilitating network traffic and security analysis at wire speed. The product captures and records 100% of the communications carried on a network without affecting network speed, allowing complex intrusion detection/prevention and network monitoring systems to be accelerated to multi-Gigabit speeds. The system allows network managers to scrutinize any detail of network traffic in real time and ensures compliance with data retention regulations.

With multiple network interface options, Ninjabox can be tailored to network and analysis software requirements. Using industry-standard hardware, Ninjabox is based on Endace's Data Acquisition and Generation (DAG) technologies. It runs on an open source operating system and comes with open source tools. Endace's DAG API is also available, allowing users to write their own customized analysis tools for deployment on Ninjabox.