I made it back from my first Interop expedition. I’m sure a lot of you are finding my blog as a result of meeting me at Interop — I owe a few of you an email to follow up on our conversations, and those will be going out next week. Feel free to initiate contact if you like, leave a comment, drop me an email, or catch me on Twitter.

I’d like to take a moment to thank Stephen Foskett and the Tech Field Day organization for faciliatating my Interop visit, as well as Spirent, NEC Networking, and Juniper Networks for sponsoring our activities and presence this week.  I’d also like to thank Jennifer “JJ” Jessup, General Manager of Interop, for her help dealing with an interesting PR contact before the event, and Jamie Porter from the UBM/Interop PR team for helping to set up a couple of meetings with exhibitors while I was there.

I met a  lot of interesting vendors, found some products and technologies to dig into more over the next couple of months, and managed to catch up on my email. There will be a couple more blog entries coming this month, but oddly one of the most impressive things I saw at Interop was that a couple of my babies were running in the core of the network.

From 1997 to 2000, I worked as the sysadmin for what used to be called Rapid City Communications. They brought out an Accelar line of routing switches with Gigabit Ethernet, got acquired by Bay networks, got acquired by Nortel Networks, and somewhere along the line converted to the Passport naming structure with the 8000 line of chassis switches. The picture to the right is the descendant of the 8606, which I probably built code for tens of thousands of times.

The Avaya fellow I spoke with came from Bay Networks… Avaya acquired Bay/Nortel’s Ethernet Routing Switch product line in 2009. Even if 10/100 with two 1GBE ports doesn’t seem that powerful anymore, and even if Nortel (and now Avaya) have had 10GBE for 12 years on the ERS8600 line, I still have a soft spot for the whole Accelar line, and always love seeing them turn up in places like the Tech Museum in San Jose and now Interop in Las Vegas.

Stay tuned for some further thoughts and experiments with WAN load balancing, Hadoop grumblings, and some interesting consumer tech that I’m expecting to try out in the foreseeable future. Thanks for dropping by.