Cloud Computing Shines At Interop New York

Cloud computing is taking center stage at this week’s Interop New York 2010, with dozens of cloud players showcasing their latest and greatest solutions to make the leap to the cloud a smooth one.

Of the more than 150 exhibitors on the Interop New York show floor, a strong percentage are cloud computing-focused or have their hand somewhere in the cloud cookie jar, whether they’re the old guard like Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) bulking up their traditional offerings to target the cloud or young startups like Vembu or Netlist.

The cloud has been evident in the keynote presentations as well, with marquee speakers like Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) vice president Ben Gibson highlighting the cloud’s force on the IT landscape and how the current model is changing.

And the vendors are taking that to heart. Microsoft made its cloud muscle and its "all in" mantra inescapable on the show floor showcasing its Windows Azure cloud platform and its BPOS suite of cloud productivity applications.

HP, too, put the cloud front and center at Interop New York. HP’s mission at Interop New York is to show IT pros how to "future-proof" their data centers, their businesses and their careers. To aid in that, HP showcased its converged network strategy that blends server, storage and networking while offering Interop New York attendees a glimpse at its ProLiant servers, BladeSystem Matrix, storage and networking gear like the A12500 core data center switch.

Other cloud players, too, like Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services, Rackspace and Terremark, offered the Interop faithful a look into their cloud computing infrastructure offerings.

And cloud security shared the spotlight, too.

McAfee showed attendees it’s cloud security wares; Bat Blue showed off its Cloud/Sec application-based offering; WatchGuard Technologies gave a peek at its cloud-based security service that couples with its firewall offerings; AppRiver highlighted its SaaS- and cloud-based e-mail and mobile messaging security tools; and AEP Networks spotlighted its CloudProtect Application Security offering, a pay-as-you-go security solution, which AEP calls SECaaS (or Security-as-a-Service) for application and data security.

Storage players also showed they’ve embraced the cloud.

Vembu launched the production release of its Pro Online Backup Service, a service hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud. The service lets VARs and MSPs offer their own branded cloud backup service leveraging the scalability and security of Amazon’s cloud. Vembu’s newest release offers cloud backup for a host of various data types and is powered by Carson City, Nev.-based Vembu’s cloud and online backup software offering StoreGrid. And Netlist gave an in-depth view of its HyperCloud memory solution to deliver high-performance memory subsystems for cloud computing to increase the amount of memory, not the number of servers.