Interop to offer datacenter products, 802.11n tools

Among the dozens of new products being announced at Interop this week, Citrix Systems is unveiling an application delivery appliance for the datacenter.

Called the NetScaler MPX, the appliance will be sold in pairs starting at $180,000, and will ship starting today, said Sanjay Uppal, Citrix vice president of marketing.

The appliance is designed to move 20TB of data, the equivalent of the text in the Library of Congress, through a datacenter in less than an hour, four hours faster than its previous models, Uppal said.

Content delivery service provider Technicolor in Anaheim, Calif., is testing the MPX, and has been able to realize 15Gbps of throughput with the device, said Yuan Wang, the company’s director of infrastructure. High-speed video on demand requires such capacity, and in a bake-off with products by competitor F5 Networks, Wang said MPX came out ahead.

F5 is the largest of three major vendors, with Citrix and Cisco Systems, in what is called the application delivery, or layer 4-7 switching market, according to various analysts and F5 officials. The technology emerged about six years ago and reached about $1.2 billion in sales globally in 2007, up about 24 percent from the prior year, said Cindy Borovick, an analyst at IDC.

Not to be outdone by Citrix at Interop, F5 is joining with Ixia in Calabasas, Calif., a provider of IP performance test systems, to jointly demonstrate F5’s Viprion, an application delivery controller. The Viprion, announced in January, is a hardware chassis based on a blade architecture, which can be deployed with one to four blades, F5 officials said.

The Viprion controller will process data loads with four blades that would take 72 blades in a Cisco Catalyst switching chassis, said Erik Giesa, vice president of product marketing. Cisco could not be reached for comment. Giesa said a Viprion controller, fully loaded with software and hardware, will cost $450,000, but said equivalent performance from Cisco or F5 products would run $2.5 million or more.

Ixia plans to use its IxLoad application and its XM hardware to demonstrate Viprion performance, company officials said.

In other news, AirMagnet will announce tools to help organizations deploy and manage new 802.11n WLAN networks.

The new products, the AirMagnet Laptop Analyst PRO 8.0, selling for $3,995, and the AirMagnet Survey PRO 6.0, selling for $3,695, are available now, with lower pricing for the bundle.

Fred Archibald, network manager for electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, said he has been using a prerelease version of the survey tool to set up 802.11n access points from Cisco.

“We have 11 of the 802.11n APs running and a whole boatload more are coming,” he said, noting that the entire campus is undergoing a refresh of its five-year-old Wi-Fi hardware running on 802.11b/g.

Having a survey tool is important because there can be problems getting 802.11n to interoperate with 802.11b/g and with “every conceivable client,” Archibald said, noting the diversity of users in a college setting. So far, the 802.11n investment has been impressive, with speeds of 100Mbps. The Multiple Input/Multiple Output technology associated with 802.11n also means that speeds are improved for non-N client devices, he said.

Archibald said Cisco has a survey tool, but it’s not a stellar one.” He has used the AirMagnet product to set up floor plans and to place the APs on a map to test signal strength. The university is opening a new seven-story building in January to support a variety of technology fields of study, and all the access points there will be 802.11n, requiring a thorough survey in advance, he said.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.