A late look at Interop NY 2008

November 17th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

Boy, time flies when you’re having fun.  I’ve just gotten my first opportunity to look back at the statistics from Interop NY 2008.  Of all the statistics, the ticketing ones have proven to be the most interesting - especially when you compare them to the Las Vegas show earlier in the year.  If you look back at the details of that ticketing review the stats clearly showed that most tickets were opened due to user error.  In NY, while “user error” dominated the other categories, “facilities” came a close second.  The InteropNet Help Desk opened a total of 94 tickets during Interop NY.  Of these tickets, 42 turned out to be user error.  Coming in second, with 17 tickets were issues with the facilities, with the most common issue being cabling that had gotten damaged between installation and the time the exhibitor was trying to use it.   In Las Vegas, despite the show being significantly larger, we only saw 6 tickets of that type.  I guess you can chalk that up as yet another reason that doing shows at The Javits Center is so much fun! (Don’t ask Julia about dealing with the Javits Center. She’ll talk your ear off.)

After Interop Las Vegas you may have seen our analysis of the data that we collected and delivered in our NOC view.  I thought I’d recreate the same data for NY and do a short comparison.

1) Like in Vegas, uptime for the network 100%.  This is no small feat considering that we introduced a new wrinkle in NY, taking down the primary NOC while the education portion of the show was still going on.  This was a forced failover to the backup systems, and it went flawlessly.  I’d like to give a little credit to EM7 on the 100% uptime as it caught a failover to battery power that allowed AC to be restored before a series of critical equipment would have gone down.

2) Again like Vegas, the average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization.  Still lots of computing overhead availabe in the show network.

3) The NY show network wasn’t nearly as busy as in Las Vegas, sustaining an average of only 27Mbps of usage (versus 56 Mbps) in Vegas.

4) Power consumption for the network and NOC in NY clocked in at 445kwh per day, about 25% less than the Las Vegas show.  This wasn’t because the equipment was any more power efficient, but instead because the show was smaller and therefore there was less network gear.

5) Finally, a stat we didn’t track too carefully in Las Vegas, but that I find interesting.  During show hours the wireless network average 1,100 users attached.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of wireless devices.

The good news is there was nothing too unexpected in the data, overall the smaller show led to a smaller number of tickets and smaller consumption of resources across the board.  We hope to have the opportunity to work with the InteropNet team again next year and take a look at this data year-over-year for each show.

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November 17th, 2008