For those of you who are NOT versed in uberGeek body language, this is the IT uberGeek’s version of a fist-fight. Oh sure… it may SEEM as if these guys are having a mild conversation about how laser light is propagated through a multimode fiber run (and something about Donkey Kong?!?!) but if you look closely you can see that Paul Dassing (from Enterasys – the guy on the right) has a shiv under his arm and is preparing to “virtualize” 3Com/H3C/HP engineer Jeff Enters (the guy in the red shirt) while Greg Hanlon (Enterasys – guy on left) distracts the poor victim.

The Father-Time-Looking guy in the background is brilliant Fluke engineer, Neal Allen (who’s book “Network Maintenance and Troubleshooting Guide” will soon be available on Amazon.com for $34.99) who has apparently had a bit too much to drink and is watching the who event through beer goggles. — Yup folks… this is Interop!

If you happened to make it to Interop New York this past week and took a stroll past the Network Operations Center (essentially a big box with transparent walls holding in some of the brightest IT uberGeeks on the planet and a few million dollars worth of networking gear) you might have seen a curious sight: Netgear ReadyNAS boxes in the racks and on the desks of the Interop engineers.

You might have done a double take just to make sure you actually saw what you thought you saw… after all, Interop is THE largest temporary network in the world, owning about 1% of the routable address space on the Internet and coming together twice a year in the US to share the latest in network technology and methodology. Interop is legendary for bringing together the best of the best in enterprise-class hardware from all around the industry — surely a storage solution from Netgear, more known for home and SMB LANs than 1000+ seat corporate networks, wouldn’t have a place in the Interopnet?!

More after the Jump »

Interop Las Vegas is the premier enterprise networking event on the calendar. Each year, somewhere between April and June, thousands of uberGeeks descend upon the sleepy city of sin and expand their minds with seminars, refresh their skills with workshops, and get wowed with the latest and greatest in networking technology on the Expo floor. It’s an event not to be missed, and anybody with the means to attend the conference even once should make the trek to see “how the pros do it.”

While Vegas is the obvious choice for a conference that has more uberGeek bling than Liberace at a Star Trek convention, Interop Las Vegas isn’t the ONLY stop on the Interop tour. The show that us engineers call, “summer camp for uberGeeks” also makes stops in Tokyo, Mumbai and New York.

More after the Jump »