Best of Interop 2013 Award Winners

Couldn’t travel to Las Vegas for Interop this year? We got you covered with this look at the Best of Interop 2013 Award winners. The judges chose the best of 149 product submissions in these 10 categories:

1. Networking
2. Cloud Computing and Virtualization
3. Data Center and Storage
4. Management and Monitoring
5. Performance Optimization and Testing
6. Security
7. Wireless, Mobility and BYOD Support
8. Best Startup
9. Audience Choice award
10. Best of Interop Grand Award

Everyone may have been talking about Software Defined Networks (SDNs) at Interop 2013, but the Arista 7500E Data Center Switch—designed for large virtualized and cloud networks—took center stage in the Networking category of the 2013 Best of Interop Awards. What really set the Arista switch apart, according to the judges, was the embedded optical modules used in place of standard CFP modules, eliminating the need for separately packaged optics and dramatically reducing the total cost per port. Artista claims a total cost per 10GbE port of $1,220.

ExtraHop Networks provides a platform for real-time operational intelligence capable of auto-discovering and auto-classifying all applications and systems out of the box. ExtraHop for AWS impressed the judges with its capability to use a “virtual tap” to provide correlated, real-time visibility into the performance of your network in the cloud. ExtraHop works across your entire workload, both on-premise and in the cloud.

OCZ Technology’s ZD-XL SQL Accelerator is a tightly integrated, plug-and-play flash acceleration product designed specifically to improve the performance of Microsoft SQL server. The judges pointed to its Data Path Cache Director, which filters commonly called data requests to flash, and its Cache Analysis Engine, which makes statistically optimized decisions on which data to cache.

ScienceLogic’s EM7 v7.3 is a management tool with pre-integrated capabilities across the spectrum of IT operations management for the data center and the cloud. It uses agentless auto-discovery to detect vendor APIs and build a detailed map of your network environment. The latest version adds the ability to visualize your resources in the cloud.

Talari Networks’ new Adaptive Private Network (APN) 3.0 software is designed to dynamically build fully meshed connections in reaction to application demand across an aggregated virtual WAN consisting of broadband, leased-line and other links. This gives an enterprise network the capability to automatically adapt to changing traffic patterns and bandwidth demands.

The Hacker Academy’s HackRack is a virtualized training environment for information security. It simulates threat scenarios, giving information security professionals experience in responding to a variety of threats. The judges said it was fast and versatile and will help enterprises get the skills they need to respond to the latest attacks.

Citrix’s Mobile Solutions Bundle provides comprehensive mobility management via XenMobile MDM and CloudGateway. It provides identity- based provisioning and control for all apps, data and devices, policy-based controls, automatic account de-provisioning for terminated employees and selective wipe of device, apps or data stored on lost devices.

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VD0360 is a video conferencing provider. The judges singled the startup out for the combination of its highly functional USB camera and unified communications conferencing cart, all at a low cost. The VDO360 solution is compatible with many commonly available software codecs, including Skype, Cisco Jabber, Vidyo, Lifesize Communicator, Microsoft Lync, Seevogh, Polycom m100 and Avaya/Radvision Scopia.

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Carrying 29 percent of the audience vote, the Citrix Mobile Solutions Bundle was the clear winner of the 2013 Best of Interop Audience Choice Award.

In addition to taking the Networking honors, judges gave Arista the Best of Interop Grand Award. They noted that Arista faced a difficult field of 30 entries in the networking category and two co-finalists: the NetScout nGenius 3900 modular monitoring switch and Aryaka’s Network- as-a-Service. But in the end, Arista’s heavy-duty switch pulled out the gold.