Interop 2012 Occupies Las Vegas

IT interoperability taking center stage at Mandalay Bay Convention Center this week.

Interop celebrated its 25^th anniversary last year in 2011. Yesterday, here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, the tradeshow and conference kicked off its next quarter century through a series of technology workshops and summits for Interop 2012.

As the name indicates, Interop promotes the interoperability of diverse technologies and services. So it aims to outline and detail how cloud computing, virtualization, networking, unified communications, convergence, security, mobility, IT management and the data center—to name just a few—can all play and work (hopefully, but not always) well together to drive business and the enterprise.

Set to be attended by thousands of IT professionals, engineers, business managers, etc. representing a gamut of industries, as well as hundreds of exhibitors, presenters and speakers, Interop 2012 Las Vegas is only one of four Interop conferences scheduled to take place in 2012.  Interop travels to Tokyo next month, before heading to New York followed by Mumbai in October.

It is a small world, made smaller by technology and the folks behind Interop aim to give the world what it thinks it needs.  Accordingly, in her note welcoming people to Interop 2012 in Las Vegas, event general manager Jennifer Jessup emphasized community and the role Interop has played in the ongoing conversation between businesses and IT solutions providers and users over the years.

She wrote, “Together we’ve explored technology innovation with enthusiasm and learned how these developments can make our organizations smarter and more productive—proving that this is the best place to learn to harness the power of IT.”

That last point may or may not be accurate. Hyperbole aside, what is certainly accurate is the huge role IT pros play in taking technological innovations and deploying them in the real world. The burden of interoperability and integrating innovative new technologies falls to the professionals and engineers that support business worldwide.

This year’s tagline for all  2012 Interops is simply Discover IT. Exactly what IT pros of all stripes will be doing over the next several days, beginning with yesterday and today’s in-depth series of workshops and Summits (e.g.  Enterprise Cloud, IT Leadership, and Principles of Effective IT Management). The Exhibition components of Interop, as well as the Keynote addresses for the tradeshow, don’t start until Tuesday. And while there will be plenty of additional workshops, seminars and presentations taking place over the last three days of the conference, it is only these first couple of days that learning and education take center stage. 

All of yesterday and today’s workshops and Summits fall under the general banners of Networking, Wireless and Mobility, Storage, IT Management, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Collaboration and the Data Center as well as through concentrated tracks.

Yesterday’s attendees could have chosen to skip the summits and take part in workshops with titles such as Wireshark and Other Open Source Tools, Mobile Strategies for BYOD, Using Solid State Disk to Accelerate Applications, Desktop Virtualization & Transformation, Practical Ethernet and Switched Network Troubleshooting, Mobile Security Threats, Exposures and Enterprise Best-Practices, and Archiving Data for the Long Term.

Today’s workshops extend to Practical Wireless Troubleshooting, Evaluating SharePoint for the Enterprise, Hands on: Remote Testing for the Common Web Application Security Threats in the morning, followed by Practical IT TCP Troubleshooting, How Will Software Defined Networks and OpenFlow Impact Enterprise Networks?, and Insider’s Guide to Evaluating Collaboration and Social Architectures and Vendors in the afternoon.

Desktop Virtualization: A Taste of Interop

So, yesterday, at the Desktop & Virtualization workshop, instructor Barb Goldworm, president and chief analyst of research, analyst and consulting firm FOCUS, provided a detailed overview of the state of desktop virtualization today. Then, over the last hour or so, workshop sponsors Citrix and VMware presented their wares in as neutral a manner as possible to attendees.

This was followed by a very useful Q&A. During this section, which closed out the workshop, Barb and  VMware reference architect Tristan Todd and Citrix principal product marketing manager Mittal Parekh, as well as an unnamed Citrix engineer who made a surprise appearance, provided some very practical advice and answers to real-world questions from the IT pros in attendance.

For instance, Tristan described in one of his answers how a feature called VMware View Storage Accelerator could enhance a company’s spinning disk environment. But how much it does so all depends on what you want to do in a cluster environment to protect yourself, especially for boot and login storms. He was followed by the unnamed Citrix engineer, who addressed the same issue from his company’s perspective by using tiered storage and having the VMs in a “pre-fired state’.

Barb then wrapped up the workshop with a couple of closing thoughts about desktop virtualization space. As she emphasized, no, we aren’t “quite” at desktop virtualization utopia yet. There have been a lot of improvements over the years thanks to the efforts of vendors such as Citrix with XenDesktop and Xenapp, as well as VMware with its View and ThinApp solutions. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the third major player in the space, has, according to Barb, implemented some good capabilities at the very low end.

“We are getting closer,” she said. “It’s complex. This isn’t a slam dunk to get to all of the use cases.” There are fewer barriers to desktop virtualization today, though, and businesses have become more realistic about the technology’s potential in terms of reducing cost. As Barb noted, desktop virtualization can be cheaper than a physical desktop, but only if it is done correctly.

The shift away from managing devices to a user centric mode is a big change to the desktop virtualization paradigm. This shift “has a lot of benefits,” according to Barb. It helps to make mixing and matching across vendors and services far more possible today than ever before, for example. Therefore IT departments can play their desktop virtualization implementation to the strengths of a particular vendor or set of vendors.

Today, desktop virtualization is now about use cases before anything else. IT pros must think about efficiency, storage, networking, bandwidth, consolidation, etc. BYOC (bring your own computer), BYOD (bring your own device) – where are you with these? And it is not just about the user experience (iPad users often hate to have to use gestures to replicate a VDI environment), but the administrative side must be taken into consideration.

This VDI session is a mere taste of what attendees are in store for over the next several days.  Tom's IT Pro is here all week to cover the conference and present some of the best that Interop 2012 has to offer IT pros.

James Alan Miller is Managing Editor of Tom's IT Pro. He is a veteran technology journalist with over seventeen years of experience creating and developing magazine and online content. Founding editor of numerous business and enterprise computing sites at the internet.com network, James headed up the After Hours section at PC Magazine, as well as hardware and software sections of various Windows publications.

See here for all Tom's IT Pro articles written by James.

(Shutterstock cover image credit: Skills)