ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM MAY 2012

[COVER STORY]

New technology options are creating new IT headaches. This year’s nine Best of Interop winners tackle those pain points.

INTEROPBest of

ooking over the more than 130 entries for theBest of Interop awards, it’s clear that vendorsare scrambling to meet IT’s demand for bet-

ter management products. As always, the simplerthings look, the more work required behind thescenes. For virtualized and cloud resources to de-liver on the promise of faster and more responsivecomputing and storage, IT needs controls to trackthose dynamic re sources—a need that winnerssuch as Cisco, Citrix, Panzura, and V3 fill. Likewise,the demand for mobile data access creates newmanagement problems for IT teams, and winnerssuch as Alcatel-Lucent, Cloudpath Networks, andMcAfee bring new ideas to mobile. Our Best of Interop overall winner also promises

simpler management, but it does somethingmore: It breaks new ground. NEC’s Programmable-Flow PF6800 Controller is the first enterprise-class,OpenFlow-compliant net work controller. ThePF6800’s relevance lies in the growing interest in

software defined networking (SDN), which coulddramatically change networking strategies. Though Ethernet is an open standard, the con-

trol plane for switching is not. That means networkadministrators are limited by the proprietary man-agement options provided by their hardware ven-dors. The SDN movement could upend thenetwork management status quo by abstractingthe control plane from the networking hardware,using an open standard like OpenFlow for net-work control. But it has to do that without sacrific-ing the reliability expected of large networkingenvironments. That’s where IT teams will look toproducts like NEC’s ProgrammableFlow PF6800Controller.What follows are details on all the Best of In-

terop winners in nine categories, with analysisfrom each of the judging teams.

—Steven Hill, Best of Interop lead judge (iwletters@techweb.com)

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Though there were more than 40 en-tries in this category, there’s nothingon the market today with which to

compare NEC’s ProgrammableFlowPF6800 Controller. It stands alone as thefirst commercial OpenFlow network con-troller to advance beyond the open sourceprojects offered by others in the softwaredefined networking movement. That makes the PF6800 an important

first, since OpenFlow networks require amaster controller to orchestrate the net-work environment. Being the first at any-

thing paints a huge target on your back, soNEC deserves a lot of credit for takingOpenFlow out of the lab and into the realworld. The open source controllers out there

are a good starting point for testing anddevelopment purposes, but most compa-nies want a product with a vendor—andthe accompanying technical support—be-hind it before trusting production loads tosuch an important role. NEC offers thePF6800 controller as an appliance or as asoftware product that can be run on your

server hardware of choice. This can be im-portant for those companies that prefer tominimize their hardware footprint.The PF6800 is based on the OpenFlow

1.0.0 standards published by the OpenNetworking Foundation, making it cross-functional with products from dozens ofOpenFlow-based networking companiesthat have sprung up. The open standardsalso could make networks more vendoragnostic, thus increasing competition.There’s still a lot of work to be done withsoftware defined networking, but thepromise is that it will make deploying net-work capacity as quick as launching a vir-tual server. OpenFlow is only a few years old, but al-

ready there are some big names in the in-dustry, such as Google, that are toutingsoftware defined networking’s potential,so it’s worth more than a passing glance.NEC’s introduction of enterprise-classproducts is an important step toward giv-ing SDN a chance to prove itself in the en-terprise IT environment. You’ll have to doyour own research on whether SDN makessense in your IT operation. But it’s possiblethat you’ll look back on this as the timewhen network management began a dra-matic change.

—Steven Hill

BEST OF INTEROP AND MANAGEMENT, MONITORING, AND TESTING

NEC ProgrammableFlow PF6800 Controller

Don Clark of NEC acceptsthe top prize from InteropGM Jennifer Jessup[

NEC Corporation of America2880 Scott Blvd.

Santa Clara, CA 95050Tel: 1-866-632-3226

Email: info@necam.com Web: www.necam.com/Pflow