Interop NY 2008 Hot Stage: A Tale of Two Cities

July 21st, 2008 by Julia Lim

For the past week I’ve been in Freemont California (outside San Jose) with the InteropNet Team getting the network back up after Vegas so that it’s ready for New York. This Hot Stage has been interesting because it really has been about the difference in the shows in Las Vegas and New York. The show in New York is a bit smaller, but because access to the venue (Javitz Center) is more restrictive than the access the team gets in Vegas (Mandalay Bay), things need to be done differently.

The big difference between the two cities is the amount of time that the InteropNet team gets to produce a live, fully operational and redundant network. In Las Vegas, this was nearly a full week of time – a tight timeframe across 17 different vendors, but now we’re looking back at that timeframe as a luxury. In NY, we’ll be getting started Saturday morning, and the network needs to be delivered on Sunday morning for the registration desk and exhibitor move-in to begin. If you’re keeping score, that’s about 24 hours to deliver a working network. Sounds hard, but it’s even harder when you consider that this means four DS-3s from two different locations, 17 full and 7 half racks of network gear, all the fiber and copper that the network is delivered over, etc all have to get done. Good thing that with 2 and 3/4 kids, I’m not planning on much sleep, and I don’t think the rest of the team is either.

In order to try and get the network delivered in that short timeframe, we worked hard at Hot Stage to assure that everything is ready to go. With some luck, the work that we’ve done here will allow us simply to roll the network gear into place, run the cables, fire up and go.

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.

I’m looking forward to the show and once again working with some of the top engineers in the country on a complex and rapidly deployed network.  Speaking of which, we’re still looking for volunteers to help in the NOC.  Volunteers get to work with some really smart people, get an education that would be hard to get anywhere else, and get a trip to NY where your expenses (for things like hotel accommodations and food provided by the show) are taken care of.  Sound interesting?  Be sure and check out the application.

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Related Posts

• August 5, 2008 -- Q&A with Sergey Katsev of Coyote Point Systems
• July 23, 2008 -- Q&A with Barry Cummings, InteropNet Help Desk Lead
• June 25, 2008 -- Q&A with Geoff Horne of InteropNet
• April 15, 2008 -- Interop.net Hot Stage — It’s History
• November 19, 2009 -- Network Monitoring at InteropNet NY 2009

Tagged with: EM7, Interop, InteropNet, ScienceLogic

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