Winners of the 2013 Interop Awards

Here is the latest and greatest list in the cool and innovative data center products for the year 2013. These results will give an insight into the benchmarks and performance standards laid down by the leaders of the data center industry today. The awards have been determined by a jury of experts and are jointly presented by Interop and Network Computing magazine. So here is the list of the winners.

1. The award in the best switches in the networking category was bagged by Arista: 7500E Data Center Switch. The Arista switch has some phenomenal features such as 3.84 Tbps per slot, sub 4 μsec latency in a chassis, support for a mix of 10, 40 and 100 GbE with a maximum of 1,152, 288 and 96 ports respectively. This product can scale up to an enormous 100,000 VXLAN nodes in a two tiered network architecture, making it a truly deserved leader in its space. The co-finalist in this networking category was the NetScout nGenius 3900 modular monitoring switch.

2. In the category for data center and storage, the winner was ZD-XL SQL Accelerator from OCZ Technology. This is a SSD based, storage and caching product that optimizes the performance of Microsoft SQL Server by using fourth generation SQL Accelerator techniques. This product demonstrated an improvement in database performance in a range of 3 to 20 times.

3. The winner in the Security category was The HackRack from the Hacker Academy. This product demonstrates true innovation and creativity by being one of its kind in the area of security training. It offers a virtual environment that simulates many security attacks making it easier for students to apply their theoretical security principles in a real world environment. It covers areas such as web application security, secure software development and enterprise security.

As you can see, the world is changing, and innovation is here to stay. AS a CIO or CTO who makes key data center decisions for your organization, these are the changes and breakthroughs happening in technology that you need to adopt in your organization.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.