Interop Las Vegas 2008 - Some Interesting Stats

June 11th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past few days looking at the data that EM7 collected on the network at Interop. A few of the statistics caught my eye and I spent some time talking to Geoff Horne, the Chief Architect of InteropNet about them. Here are the ones that we thought were most interesting.

1) We ended up monitoring 209 nodes in the official show network. They broke down as follows:

EM7 pulled data from all of these devices and delivered a single view of the data to the NOC.

2) Uptime for the network was 100%. That isn’t to say that there weren’t some device failures, but each of them was handled properly by the redundancy in the network and the show exhibitors and attendees saw no impact from these failures. This is a real testament to the design and build of the network. It’s hard enough to build a complicated network in two weeks, but then to keep it up and running 100% of the time in the wild west environment that is Interop, is really phenomenal.

3) The average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization. This is interesting because many items were virtualized using vmWare this year and yet, there was still a lot of hardware overhead available. (Maybe we should run Folding@Home on the show network?)

4) The show network was busy. By our calculation over 864 gigabytes of data was pulled in and 1.01 terabytes of data were pushed out of the WAN links in the 3 days that the show floor was open. That’s a sustained 56Mbps average, including off hours. At peak the show network hit about 102Mbps of WAN utilization.

5) In the three days the show floor was open the network and its supporting NOC gear used 600 kwh (kilowatt hours) per day. As a comparison, the town of Rockport, Missouri (1,300 residents) uses about 35,600kwh per day. On a side note, they are completely powered by wind power and in fact sell 3,000,000kwh per year back to the local power utility. I’m thinking next year Interop should bring some wind turbines as part of the InteropNet kit?

Next I’ll be doing some analysis on the trouble tickets opened. I think it’ll be interesting to see the kinds of issues that vendors experienced and how quickly the InteropNet staff handled them. Look for that in the next couple of days.

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June 11th, 2008

2 Comments Add your own

  • 1. Interop NY 2008 Hot Stage&hellip  |  July 21st, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    [...] Now, things never really work out that way but that’s what EM7 is going to be there for. We’ll watch in real time as the network elements come live and be able to let the other InteropNet vendors know if their gear isn’t behaving as expected or is not visible for all the areas of the network that it should be. We’ll keep track of all of this in the EM7 ticketing system so that after the show we’ll be able to analyze the behavior of the network and systems as we did after Vegas. [...]

  • 2. Q&A with Sergey Katse&hellip  |  August 5th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    [...] Katsev: InteropNet is an amazing networking opportunity (no pun intended).  The group of engineers that put the network together every year is, well, amazing.  There is so much combined experience that any question instantly has several possible answers, and the best answer is chosen very quickly.  One of the ’sayings’ at Interop is “if you run into a problem, ask someone… we’ve probably seen that problem before… five times.”  One would think that being part of InteropNet is the same thing, year after year.  However, in the two years that I’ve been part of this (for four shows), there have been huge differences in the way that the network is designed and put together.  These are both because the vendors selected every year are different, and because the engineers who design the network change from year to year.  Somehow, though, when all is said and done, we have a network that works. [...]

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