Just coming off of TWO WEEKS of blissful vacation and I'm thrust headlong into the chaotic bloodsport that is Spring Interop (no longer with the "Networld+" appendage...only for the last three years...shows you how aware I am). Today the show floor is stll being built by various vendor engineers and some friends of mine: Brian Chee our Geeks in Paradise lab director and my generous Vegas landlord, Padre aka The Just coming off of TWO WEEKS of blissful vacation and I’m thrust headlong into the chaotic bloodsport that is Spring Interop (no longer with the “Networld+” appendage…only for the last three years…shows you how aware I am). Today the show floor is stll being built by various vendor engineers and some friends of mine: Brian Chee our Geeks in Paradise lab director and my generous Vegas landlord, Padre aka The Tech Stop aka Father Ballecer.So presently I’m wading through carnage caused by dozens of SEs given free reign to setup the latest equipment, management software and geek toys. Pallet crates all over the floor, little golf carts laden with tools, cables and various shiny boxes loaded with eth ports, bubble wrap wisping around on air conditioned slip streams like tumbleweeds in a nerd desert. Some geeks are positioning webcams on the cat walks to zoom in on the best booth babes, others are kidnapping an opposing team’s routers and sending ransom notes as trouble tickets and still more are playing with nerd toys like Padre’s bunnies (below; weenie scammed FOUR of these things; I can’t even get ONE! They’re utterly useless but stuffed with geek toys and APIs, like RFID, 802.11x, SNMP, RSS, lights the sync, ears that rotate according to scripted directions, way more. Data center toys worth hours of wasted time). Oh yeah, and all of them are building a hugely complex network interconnecting hundreds of vendors’ latest wares–and they’re doing it in a week. All this against the backdrop of girls, gambling and debauchery that is Vegas. Yeah, I’ve got a headache, but it’s okay.View Padre’s Bunny Army So the show floor may be closed, but that’s not stopping vendors from making loads of announcements and bombarding my inbox with them. So here goes from the SMB perspective:* 3Com announces new SMB security platform. Called the X family, they’re actually for both enterprises and SMBs, apparently. Combination smart IPS with firewall, VPN and content filtering built-in. Nothing to make the nether regions tingle, but good for competition.* SecureWave does Sanctuary 4.2. Latest iteration of their endpoint security client. Does custom reports, script & macro protection, pasword lockout & recovery and offline temp permissions. Hey, this is the year of security so check it out. * But watch out for NAP & TCG. Microsoft’s pushing its Network Access Protection endpoint security HARD. Using Interop to announce that: “they will provide customers and partners interoperability of TCG’s Trusted Network Connect (TNC) architecture and Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP)”. In other words, NAP’s coming to networks near you.* Netreo does traffic management as SaaS. This is cool for SMBs who want more sophisticated traffic flow analysis, but don’t want to pay for additional infrastructure or software clients. Netreo’s OmniCenter Flow does all the analysis, but in a SaaS delivery model. Sign up, simplified software setup and go. * Critical Links is unveiling its Office-in-a-Box appliance. Not well named, but it’s a well-featured edge appliance for SMBs. Official name is edgeBOX, and it does the whole firewall/edge router thing, but combines it with VoIP gateway and PBX thing. All in one box for the SMB set. More news as the day goes on… Technology Industry