One of the coolest displays I saw at Interop was not in Start-up City nor in the Czech Republic zone. It wasn’t the Lamborghini that Securent rolled onto the floor, nor was it the Barracuda Bus. It was the fiber backplane that HP brought out from its R&D facility and had running as a proof of concept, as well as the number of vendors that had products–nearly all proof of concepts–in the InteropNet Openflow lab. Staying awake is hard after sitting through the sixth top-of-rack switch of the day. Showcases like HP’s and Openflow’s should be an important part of any trade show because they remind us why what we do is cool and fun.
Network Computing