Interop Las Vegas: 10 Cool Products

The Interop conference and exhibition, where technology innovation is on display everywhere you look, gets underway on Monday in Las Vegas. The event features more than 125 workshops and conference classes, and more than 300 companies will be showing their latest technologies. Taking place at the same time is the inaugural InformationWeek CIO Summit, an event designed to help companies create an organization and culture that places a premium on innovation.

The workshops, classes and sessions provide the information and case studies that tech leaders need to move forward, while the exhibit floor showcases the new products and technologies available to help them accomplish their goals. We highlight a few of those products in this slideshow.

One such product is the INE Gen III, iTrinegy's network emulator, which will be officially released to the world on May 7. One among a family of products, the INE Gen III recreates various network dysfunctions -- such as latency, jitter, packet drops and so on -- to let you test application performance. The Gen III sports an easy-to-use programming language that allows users to "program" the emulator to take care of any required action on the incoming or outbound datastream. As a result, you get greater control of the data packets. Pricing is $20,000, and the Gen III will ship at the end of the second quarter this year.

On a separate note, iTrinegy's AppQoS is a Best of Interop finalist in the Management & Monitoring category.

Dell is showcasing three new additions to its networking clan: The Dell Networking S5000, the company's first 1U modular LAN/SAN switching platform, will give you pay-as-you-grow Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity. The slender storage switch houses four modules, and users can populate a single module when starting out; then increase as needed instead of buying all four modules at once. The switch will be available in July, and pricing will depend on how you populate the available slots. Dell says that the S5000 will run from approximately $20,000 to $35,000.

Dell is also showing its new Active Fabric solutions for SDN-enabled design. Active Fabric uses high-density and low-latency fixed-form factor 10/40-GbE switches. Plus, the software abstraction layer that SDN provides allows for open programmability, adapting the infrastructure for different customer environments.

Lastly, the company's Active Fabric Manager tool automates planning, designing, building and monitoring networking fabrics. This next-gen management software includes an intuitive design wizard, a step-by-step approach -- as opposed to scores of command line entries -- along with role-based access.

In the Best of Interop Awards, the Dell Networking S5000 is a finalist in the Data Center & Storage category.

Now dig into our slideshow to get a look at other cool products expected at Interop Las Vegas 2013.