You don’t often see Cisco, Juniper and Microsoft working together. But that’s what happened last month as the superstars of NAC gathered in an industrial warehouse in Belmont, Calif., to prepare for InteropLabs (iLabs), the experimental portion of the Interop show network, to be up and running in Las Vegas from May 20 to 25.

Engineers from the big three of NAC, plus a whole cast of cooperating engineers from Enterasys, Extreme Networks, HP, ID Engines, LANDesk, Lockdown Networks, OSC, Trapeze Networks and Trend Micro worked collectively to build a massive interoperable NAC network. While the news is that all the big players were present in this effort, we can’t go without noting that the testing was led by the iLabs engineering team, volunteers from companies around the world, who designed the big-picture view, set the ground rules, and acted as ringmasters and referees.

Last year, at iLabs’ inaugural dip into NAC interoperability, the team built three silos of NAC, proving that Cisco’s CNAC, TCG’s TNC and Microsoft’s NAP all were mature enough to work on their own with a good mix of equipment. This year, the team reached higher and built a single enormous network that combined all three frameworks into a massive NAC interoperability love-fest.

Overall, the iLabs NAC testing showed three things:

• Cisco CNAC, Microsoft NAP and TCG/TNC all are mature enough to make interoperable NAC a candidate for any network.

• Levels of enforcement, ranging from go/no-go passage through VLANs, ACLs, filters and even firewalls, are easily available and — at least to some extent — interoperable across different vendors.

• There are a wide range of special client issues -- such as MAC authentication for VoIP phones and multiple systems trying to establish a secure connection through a single switch port—that IT managers will need to understand in order cleanly and securely integrate them into a NAC deployment.