Interop News: Schneider, NaviSite, Marvell, Alcatel-Lucent

Here’s a roundup of some of the news coming out of the 2012 Interop conference this week in Las Vegas:

Schneider Announces InfraStruxure for Small Business: Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, today announced InfraStruxure for Small IT, which will enable small-to-medium sized businesses to design and build their physical IT infrastructures around the power of a comprehensive offering, including both software and hardware. The InfraStruxure offer, which now provides comprehensive solutions ranging from small IT environments up to two megawatt data centers, had previously only been available to large enterprises. This new offer will speed the deployment, configuration and installation of IT infrastructures in small environments, such as a server room, network closet or non-dedicated space. "The rapid adoption of new business technologies and the influx of increasingly challenging amounts of data have made intelligent IT operations critical to any size business -- not just large corporations. But because the industry primarily uses a component approach, current offerings do not address the growing complexity of critical, small IT spaces," said Dave Johnson, Senior Vice President, Home & Business Networks, Schneider Electric. "We're excited to launch the first truly comprehensive solution to this problem by developing an integrated, simplified solution that consolidates vendors, reduces man-hours and enables remote device and environmental management."

NaviSite launches NaviCloud Storage. NaviSite introduced NaviCloud Intelligent Storage (NCIS) that enables enterprises to store, manage, and protect distributed, unstructured content with a flexible and scalable solution. NaviSite will be using the EMC Atmos cloud storage platform to offer customers storage-as-a-service, mobile file share and endpoint backups, archival storage and recovery, and a network attached storage extension for making longer use of legacy systems. NaviSite was acquired a little over a year ago by Time Warner. “NaviSite recognizes the rapidly increasing data storage needs of today’s enterprises and is excited to add such a robust and flexible storage solution to our existing portfolio,” said Chris Patterson, product manager, NaviSite. “NaviCloud Intelligent Storage is a cornerstone to providing our customers with scalable and secure mobile cloud storage, big data archival, and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.”

Alcatel-Lucent expands 40 GigE capabilities.  Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) announced a major upgrade of its data center switching solution or ‘fabric’, the Alcatel-Lucent Mesh. By extending high-performance 40 gigabit Ethernet (40 GigE) links throughout the Mesh, the company has dramatically increased the speed, responsiveness and flexibility of enterprise data center networks. 40 GigE has been added to the OmniSwitch 10K Modular Ethernet LAN chassis and this along with 'Shortest Path Bridging' can optimize server-to-server communications across the mesh. The Alcatel-Lucent mesh has also been verified as Citrix Ready. “Networking infrastructure has taken center stage as the unstoppable forces of mobility and cloud transform the demands of the datacenter," said Klaus Oestermann, Group VP & GM Cloud Networking Group at Citrix. "With the Citrix cloud networking portfolio including NetScaler 10 and Branch Repeater 6 we are giving enterprises the same cloud platform capabilities to power their business that the largest public clouds have enjoyed for years.  This is game changing, and we are excited to work with one of the world’s leading communications companies to usher in this new era.  As a charter member of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s ecosystem program, we will be able to give our enterprise customers the confidence to deploy full interoperable Citrix Ready solutions.”

Marvell's all-encompassing cloud services.  Marvell (MRVL) announced an end-to-end cloud services and infrastructure platform that offers networking, compute and storage solutions that support all three clouds – private, public, and home – as well as fiber and mobile Internet service infrastructure. For the private cloud Marvell offers 4x4 wireless access point technology, and a high density silicon solution for 40G interconnects.  For the home cloud Marvell offers a low-power ARM CPU, SOHO switch, power management and connectivity solutions, and a high performance SoC (System on Chip) enabling a lower power, always-on, home server. Marvell's infrastructure serves as the cloud foundation and includes platforms for LTE 'World Modem' and Universal PON access, true 100G line-rate programmable packet processing for access, transport and backhaul, and a commercially available single-chip, terabit switch platform. "I am very proud of Marvell’s leadership in offering a complete end-to-end solution, from mobility to video to the cloud," said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. "Today we live and work in a world of connecting every aspect of the digital lifestyle, utilizing social media and social networking. With the rapid adoption of smartphones, smart TVs and tablets around the world, people are transferring ever-larger amounts of data to and from the cloud.”