Our 101st Entry... and cool stuff I saw

I was at Interop the other week and caught up with some old friends and new and saw what they were up to. A few, in no order, that I personally thought were intriguing:

1) Rohati. Rohati was not exhibiting but I caught up with some good friends who started this firm and they have a very interesting approach to network services and security. It's one of those 'Why didn't I think of that!' type of products that I think when they publicly announce will be well received.

2) Compellent. Compellent makes storage arrays with integrated virtualization capabilities. I was impressed here with the ease of use they were bringing to what normally is complex and management intensive (Information Lifecycle Management, automatic block data movements to streamline drive head read/write operations, and tiered storage) They were not in my favorite booth (i.e. not ours :) but I was impressed with the knowledge their team had of their products and if someone could explain ILM to me in a few seconds and demonstrate the setup/operations with ease that goes a long way in todays compelx world.

3) Splunk. A pretty unique approach to network management and fault isolation and discovery. I like seeing innovation and think the NMS space has huge opportunities for improvement and value creation, there is a neat and novel approach here that can really help.

dg