After a very interesting panel on computational biology (a great seventh-inning brain stretch), the DEMO 2006 stage turned to network health. Some of the products demonstrated sounded like heaven-sent solutions for IT managers and support staff:
Persystent Technologies CEO Ray Weadock was one of the more enjoyable presenters of the day, as he gleefully deleted files from and changed binary values in his Windows operating system. Naturally, none of these changes stuck because the Persystent system demonstrated had introduced proactive management and user policies that prevented corruption from occurring. The system is also supposed to have automated support and self-repair, but watching it block damage to Windows was interesting enough on its own.
Disaster recovery was the theme of the Avokia demonstration. They pulled the plug on a database being used in a live auction, without any disruption to the live transactions. ApLive provided the continuous availability for the DBMS in this scenario. I'm a true believer when it comes to the market needs in storage, replication, and clustering, so hope that this offering can add to availabile capabilities.
How many users can a wireless system support without congestion? Extricom claims that it has already addressed coverage and mobility problems with its high-performance wireless LAN infrastructure products for data, voice, video, and other mobile applications. In today's demo, they addressed the need for more and more bandwidth. The company deployed six access points in the demonstration room. They showed what happened when three clients hopped onto the network and started roaming around the room. As the users did so, the performance log showed that each client had steady access When the company turned on their "true reuse" technology, you could see that each client's bandwidth increased by 3x. This essentialy turned one channel into three channels of capacity, in a concentrated area. The company confidently stated that this solution is what will make the gigabit WLAN possible.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys demo 2006 persystent extricom technology avokia networks
