August 7th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Meet Mike Lawson, Pre-Sales Engineer at Apptis Technology Solutions (ATS), a leading system integrator and ScienceLogic partner that has deployed EM7 to meet the network, systems and application management needs of several customers. We thought Mike would have an interesting perspective to share on EM7, having recently come from the “customer side” and already with a few deployments under his belt.
ScienceLogic: Mike, what’s your background working with network and management system tools?
Mike Lawson: Before joining ATS, I worked for the Air Force, mainly in satellite communications for almost nine years. I’m probably most familiar with HP OpenView and BMC Remedy. I managed a team that used them but wasn’t involved in tool selection; like many other federal IT workers, we didn’t have a choice of tools because there were existing enterprise licenses and maintenance contracts.
I also saw a large systems integrator do a full Remedy/Crystal Systems/OpenView installation. It took 6 weeks to stand up and customize to meet just the basic monitoring requirements, and it cost something like half a million dollars. At the time, I thought that wasn’t bad and was a pretty typical experience.
ScienceLogic: Coming from where you did, what’s your take on EM7?
Mike Lawson: Honestly, I didn’t believe that EM7 could really do all that it claimed. In many ways, it was the complete opposite of what I had seen first-hand with other monitoring solutions. Could it really cover that much functionality? At relatively much lower cost to the customer and without the licensing nightmare?
That quickly changed when I needed to understand the system enough to run it at a customer’s site. I went back over the training docs I received during my initial training class and jumped in; now, 6 months later, I’m the EM7 expert and can tell you that it delivers on all those promises. (But I still need to show people to get them to believe it too)
I preach the “EM7 gospel” and when anyone wants to talk monitoring, I ask about the universal pain points: cost, maintenance contracts and licensing, and then I explain EM7. The cost difference is real; the solution is based on capacity, so there’s no licensing and it’s easy to use. They are shocked to learn that they can buy multiple EM7 appliances and years of maintenance for what they paid for most other tools.
ScienceLogic: ATS won the contract for monitoring aboard the USNS Mercy. We love that you’re using EM7 for one of the Navy’s hospital ships. Can you tell us more?
Mike Lawson: The USNS Mercy is a Military Sealift Command hospital ship. Some stats:
- 849 feet long (nearly the size of a football field)
- 12 fully-equipped operating rooms, a 1,000 bed hospital facility, digital radiological services, a diagnostic and clinical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, a CAT scan and two oxygen producing plants
- Crew: 61 civilian mariners, 956 Naval medical staff, and 259 Naval support staff
The USNS recently departed on a five-month humanitarian mission in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia in support of Pacific Partnership 2008. The partnership provides international medical, dental and engineering teams this summer to provide humanitarian support and conduct joint, combined, and cooperative Civil-Military Operations in order to improve regional stability and build partner capacity to respond to natural disasters and pandemic.
For the most part, the ship’s network is self-contained, but can also use a landline when docked. The network covers 400 devices, including Windows/Exchange servers and VMware for server virtualization. Prior to using EM7, none of the monitoring was integrated; each system was independently monitored through individual vendor-specific consoles.
Out of the box, EM7 provided integrated systems, application and network management for all network gear, applications and virtual machines in one solution. We didn’t have to do a lot of customization – EM7 includes best-practice based thresholds, event and monitoring templates and this covered what USNS Mercy needed to monitor.
ScienceLogic: You’re a systems integrator with a very useful “customer point of view” when it comes to looking at tools. From that perspective, can you share what you think are the biggest benefits that EM7 provides?
Mike Lawson: First of all, EM7 stands up right away. We’re talking days, not weeks. In contrast to the lengthy installation of OpenView and Remedy I witnessed during my military career, I was able to configure, customize, and implement the EM7 solution for the USNS Mercy in three days.
Second, it’s easy to train people on and the support is outstanding. This judgment is from first-hand experience. Right before the USNS Mercy departed on its latest voyage, the system administrator I had trained on EM7 left, so I had all of a day to train some new EM7 admins. I prepared a seven-page “cheat sheet” and over a 3-hour conference call, we walked through the entire EM7 solution; I haven’t gotten a support call since.
And when a problem did crop up with a device being discovered incorrectly, ScienceLogic was very responsive. We contacted ScienceLogic support on a Saturday and they created and emailed us a video to help troubleshoot the same day. Within 30 seconds of watching the video, the problem was resolved.
Finally, EM7 helps us be good stewards of the government’s money. This is very important to me personally and to ATS as a company. Because EM7 is cheaper and deploys so quickly and easily, you might think that it’s just the opposite of what a system integrator would want to use. But that’s short-term thinking. We believe in delivering the most value for customers every time. It’s what creates trust and long-term relationships with our customers. Instead of that half million spent on standing up the solution and basic setup, I’d much rather (and I know the customer would rather) spend that on fine-tuning or extending the solution to do much, much more.
As a former government employee, I know what it’s like to use a tool that doesn’t fit my needs. EM7 proves that the best solution can totally break the old model of costly, lengthy installations. EM7 has the right model: the right solution and the right price delivered as an appliance that is easy to deploy, train on and use.
Popularity: 31% [?]
August 7th, 2008
August 5th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sergey Katsev, an Engineering Project Manager at Coyote Point Systems and discuss his experiences with InteropNet and talk about the Coyote Point products. With a couple of years of experience as a vendor for Interop, he had some interesting insights in to how participating in the InteropNet can help a vendor.
ScienceLogic: How long have you been involved in InteropNet?
Katsev: I started at Coyote Point 3 years ago and InteropNet 2006 was my first “big” assignment. This was the first time Coyote Point had put in a proposal to participate, so we were very excited when we were selected.
ScienceLogic: How long has Coyote Point been involved in Interop overall?
Katsev: We’ve been exhibiting at Interop for a number of years, and after seeing the InteropNet in action, we decided to submit a proposal in ‘06. We were actually one of the first companies in the load balancing/traffic management space (we’ve been doing this for almost 10 years), so we have a lot of experience to share with InteropNet.
ScienceLogic: What is your role at Coyote Point?
My official title is “Engineering Project Manager”. Basically, that means that I’m in charge of product releases and maintenance. It sounds like a weird title for someone participating in InteropNet, but I’ve actually found it extremely useful since my position means that I don’t get to see our systems out in the field a lot. We’ve added several features and have ideas for others just from my experiences at InteropNet.
ScienceLogic: What do the Coyote Point products do?
Katsev: Coyote Point makes a Traffic Management appliance called Equalizer. What this means is that any traffic destined for a datacenter’s servers goes through our appliances and we make sure that the server which is best equipped to handle it, does. Our systems sit between the clients and the servers and monitor the client traffic and the state of the servers. If the clients start sending more traffic, we’ll balance it out so that no server is overloaded. If one of the servers stops responding or starts responding very slowly, we’ll steer traffic away from that server.
ScienceLogic: In what way are your products being used as part of InteropNet?
Katsev: In the InteropNet, we’re utilizing a lot of our expertise: We’re making sure that traffic is balanced and servers are redundant for show services such as DNS and SMTP. We’re also using our geographic load balancing technology to ensure that the ScienceLogic EM7 appliances and some other internal NOC services are available from anywhere, with the lowest latency, with our SSL acceleration and GZIP compression technology. Finally, we’re helping logistics in the NOC by allowing a physical separation between systems located in the NOC and those in an emergency rack outside of the NOC. If either of these two locations were to fail, the network will continue operating without a glitch.
ScienceLogic: Are there any special considerations for Interop that cause you to deploy your systems there differently that any other place?
Katsev: Interop is definitely different than most of our customer installations. One difference from a standard environment is that the network (at least this year) is one large flat network, with pieces carved out where extra security is needed. Because of this, we can actually run our failover pairs of Equalizer systems in a non-standard configuration where the two peers are in different racks, or even on different floors. That’s one of the things that I really like about InteropNet — it definitely brings new ideas to mind, which end up becoming ’special configuration’ white papers after the show.
ScienceLogic: Has InteropNet taught you anything that caused you to actually change your product?
Katsev: In addition to the failover configuration differences I mentioned above, participating in InteropNet has actually caused us to add several new features and allowed configurations. One example is the “no-spoof” option for Layer 4 clusters. Prior to the 2006 shows, we always ’spoofed’ the client’s IP address when talking to a server so that the server would see the client’s IP address instead of our own. At Interop, we ran into a special configuration which would’ve been very difficult to set up in this manner, so our engineers added this feature, and it’s been very a very popular configuration with our customers ever since.
We have also had a couple of business relationships that extended outside of the show. In 2006, we had a good experience using Spirent Communications gear to benchmark the network, so we ended up purchasing a couple of these systems to test our products. More recently, we have found a way to bundle our Equalizer e350si load balancers with the ScienceLogic EM7 collector appliances to help ScienceLogic get the best performance in load balancing large quantities of syslog messages to be processed. If it wasn’t for our participation in InteropNet, neither of these relationships would’ve happened.
ScienceLogic: What’s the best part of being involved with InteropNet? What do you most look forward to?
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.
ScienceLogic: You don’t have to answer this one if you’re not comfortable… What would you like to see changed with the way things are done at InteropNet?
Katsev: This isn’t a cop-out… I really can’t think of anything I would do differently. Sure, there are small problems that pop up sometimes, but every project has those, and the people at InteropNet are more than capable of figuring them all out. In fact, I know that Interop started out as a show to test the interoperability of devices… but I’m still amazed that all of these devices actually talk to each other and “play nice” together.
Popularity: 32% [?]
August 5th, 2008
August 5th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Too bad there is no Kaplan Test Prep equivalent for FISMA.
For the third year in a row, the government’s overall FISMA grade improved. But don’t get too excited; the grade only improved from a C- to a C this year. (And D+ in 2005).
But there’s a lot to hide in an “average grade”. Turns out that the reality is a split between overachievers and underachievers.
The agencies/departments with a grade of A-, A or A+:
- Department of Justice
- US AID
- EPA
- NSF
- SSA
- HUD
- OPM (I would hope so)
And, sadly the ones that got an F:
- Department of the Interior
- Department of Treasury
- Nuclear Regulatory Commission
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Agriculture
FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) became a federal law back in 2002 as part of the E-Government Act. Six years later, there has been improvement, but there’s still clearly a long way to go.
So what’s the disconnect? Speaking from a vendor perspective, we’ve had first-hand experience with the lack of actionable, concrete guidelines around FISMA – for processes, monitoring and check-list assessment items. We even contacted NIST directly to get more guidance on how their very broad guidelines should be translated to actual features and reporting in something like our monitoring solution. The end goal, after all, is to help our government customers not only meet the FISMA requirements but also to be seen/assessed as meeting those requirements. As we do for other compliance/governance requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley, the more that EM7 can automate and report on, the better.
But that leads to the second issue here. How accurate is the FISMA scorecard? SC Magazine writes, “Many have seen organizations get an A when they believe they should have received an F, and vice versa” and some experts “blame this on the lack of a standardized evaluation, as well as censorship among auditors.” There’s talk about language ambiguities and opinions that the scorecard is not “one size fits all” – that small agencies face different IT security challenges than the big guys.
So what’s right about FISMA? We can point to a heightened awareness about the importance of security and the “security picture” in each federal agency. Certainly, from our own survey at FOSE, we saw the difference just from last year to this one:
- 91% surveyed said FISMA was important (up from 66% last year)
- Over 50% had solutions installed to help with FISMA (up from only 14% last year)
Based on these numbers, we’re not surprised to see the FISMA average grade go up, but we expected it to be even higher. So what will it take to get the government on the honor roll? From Rep. Tom Davis, “We need to seriously consider incentives for agency success and funding penalties and personnel reforms for agencies that don’t measure up…We need a bill with teeth, and we need agencies to understand the goal is to keep information safe, not to check a statutory box.”
Popularity: 19% [?]
August 5th, 2008
August 1st, 2008 by Julia Lim
The Yankee Group had this not-so-urgent advice for IPv6 visibility. “It may be time to ask your network monitoring and management software vendors about their plans for IPv6 visibility.” Although we’re still a few years away from broad adoption of IPv6 in the US, experts have been urging enterprises to pave the way for a smooth migration now by having IPv6-ready infrastructure in place…
I’ll take your 6 centers of excellence and uh, raise you 2 data centers. Following up on the HP announcement that they’ve partnered with Yahoo and Intel to create cloud computing Centers of Excellence this week, IBM said they were building out 2 data centers to accommodate the coming cloud computing resources need. I should say that IBM had already announced their “partnership” with Google to provide services for the cloud back in May. Who’s left to partner with on cloud computing? Microsoft and Amazon?
Packet Trap Networks recently conducted a survey of network engineers and IT professionals who perform network management duties inside companies with more than 100 employees. Out of the 800 engineers surveyed, 49 percent stated that they did not have a comprehensive network management system in place – showing a need for solutions focused on the mid-market – i.e., the right features at reasonable prices. If you remember, Sevcik and Wetzel (not a vendor!) conducted their own survey on application performance management and had similar findings but a rather different answer… (hint – starts with “E” and ends in “7”)
Is open-source software more secure? After all thousands of eyes are better than a handful, right? Well, according to a report sponsored by Fortify Software, that’s just not the case. Roger Thornton, founder and CTO of Fortify Software, adds that the underlying problem is “a lack of understanding and collaboration between developers and security experts – today each are talking past each other when it comes to security.”
For all you aspiring CIOs out there, WSJ has provided a must-read list. Uh oh– the first on the list is “How to Read a Book”. Please, any negative comments directly on the Journal site…and any “good” ones here!
Popularity: 32% [?]
August 1st, 2008
July 25th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Terry Childs captivated much of the IT world over the past week and a half with his lock-down of San Francisco’s IT system. Instead of watching a bunch of police chasing a white Bronco, this time the coverage amounted to many many articles, blog posts, comments, and long email chains. It seemed I would read one thing and the very next one would contradict or shed more light on some aspect of the case.
Depending on who you talk to, he is:
a) a hero
b) a disgruntled worker
c) in need of a serious work/life adjustment
d) in need of $5 million and/or a better lawyer
e) all of the above
Surprisingly strong opinions, regardless of what you choose.
We chose to lighten things up a bit and, as we always try to do, figure out how to help our customers be proactive. So here it is, the Top 10 Signs Your Network Admin has Gone Rogue:
10) David Letterman has a Top 10 list called “Top 10 Signs Your Network Admin Has Gone Rogue”
9) Your Admin is the only one with the network device log-ins and refuses to share them with anyone else.
‘8) His presentations about network configuration include the words “Magic” and “Burn after reading”.
7) Instead of email, he forces everyone to use the Suggestion box placed outside of his door…and then places a very obvious nanny-cam hidden in a teddy bear right next to it.
6) He begins to grow out his sideburns and every question directed to him in meetings results in the same response, “Do you feel lucky today, punk?”
5) He has the mayor on speed-dial.
4) He starts wearing very big shoes to the office and accosts random people in the hallways asking if they think they could fill them.
3) He refuses to write router and switch configs to flash citing network security concerns.
2) He calls you and asks for a $5 million salary advance; caller id flashes “Department of Corrections”.
And #1: You’re the City of San Francisco
Enjoy your lock-down free weekend!
Popularity: 34% [?]
July 25th, 2008
July 25th, 2008 by Julia Lim
Happy System Administrator Day!
Of all things, I had to read about this on the Wall Street Journal. But check out the link for some kudos and a chuckle or two for the System Administrator Appreciation song.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the military is taking “Tech Lessons”. It seems that over the last few years, the DISA CIO has been visiting different tech companies to learn about cutting-edge technologies that might be able to help soldiers in the battlefield. CIO Garing identified social networks and mashups as great technologies for smaller projects with potentially more immediate impact than the traditional years-long IT projects of the past. He should check out NAPA and the Collaboration Project which highlights just how government agencies and orgs are already doing what he’s talking about.
Just what I was waiting for, open source takes on cloud computing. 
We had a very interesting call this week with analyst firm, The 451 Group, about the cloud and who is really doing what in this space now. Trying to separate the hype from reality, just like everyone else.
After a disappointing (to analysts and the street) financial analyst call on Tuesday, VMware’s stock reached an all time low, almost back to the IPO stage. In a follow-up interview, Forbes asked the new CEO what he thinks about the stock price, the analysts saying VMware doesn’t have a solid or innovative growth plan for the future, and whether VMware should be part of EMC or not (their backhand way of bringing up the whole Diane Greene thing…he didn’t fall for it).
Wait for it…wait for it…we have been waiting for it. VMware announced plans to launch a free version of its ESXI hypervisor starting July 28. I have to question the timing on this one. Why didn’t they do this before Hyper-v came out and try to at least undercut the Microsoft announcement? VMware is and should be the leader in this space but they act like they’re playing from behind. And to Wall Street, perception counts for a lot.
Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a lot of coverage after the June 2008 OMB mandate on IPv6 readiness. But one interesting follow-up, a feature is set to be added to IPv6 which the upgrade was supposed to eliminate. One of the design goals for IPv6 was that it would rid the Internet of network address translation (NAT), gateways that match increasingly scarce public IPv4 addresses with private IPv4 addresses used inside corporations, government agencies and other organizations. NAT adds complexity and cost, but due to the length of time it’s taken to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6, engineers may create special NAT devices to translate between IPv4-only and IPv6-only hosts and hopefully nudge along the transition to IPv6. IEEE is all set to meet on this topic later this month.
Popularity: 29% [?]
July 25th, 2008
July 24th, 2008 by Julia Lim
A recent Goldman Sachs report explains the results of the company’s survey of 100 IT execs (mostly CIOs). IT spending growth will slip from 7 percent to 5 percent in 2008.
An interesting excerpt:
“CIOs have emphasized to us that they are buying on a need versus want basis, are often downsizing deals to fit with current budget constraints…In fact, contrary to general tightening in spending, purchases with an especially compelling ROI are being accelerated in the current environment.”
Hmm. Certainly we all understand prioritizing what to buy on need versus want– my friend who runs an art gallery that has only sold one piece in the past 2 months can certainly explain it. I “need” that Picasso? But does it take the entire economy slowing down before CIOs, even at Fortune 100 companies, to focus on ROI? So it’s not surprising what showed up at the top of the list for spending priorities for 2008-2009:
- Server Virtualization
- Server Consolidation
- Cost Cutting
At the bottom of the list, grid computing and on-demand computing.
Compare this to last year’s spending survey where the top 10 priorities by rank were:
- Applications integration
- Security
- Cost Cutting
- BI
- ERP
- Web-based app development
- Datacenter consolidation
- Disaster Recovery
- Compliance/risk management
- Identity and access management
So in one year, the very hot “server virtualization” (and quite similar server consolidation) jumped to the top of the spending priority list. Can anyone have predicted just how much mindshare virtualization would capture in such a short time? Virtualization is not a new concept; it just seems that way. What will be # 1 next year?
Popularity: 26% [?]
July 24th, 2008
July 23rd, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio
During Interop New York 2008 Hot Stage I had the opportunity to sit down with Barry Cummings, the team lead for the InteropNet Help Desk to talk to him about his experiences with Interop and EM7.
ScienceLogic: What’s your real job when you’re not here?
Cummings: I’m a consultant. I have a networking services company through which I offer services all the way from Layer 1 to desktop support.
ScienceLogic: How long have you been involved with Interop?
Cummings: I attended my first show in 1996. I volunteered for my first shown in 1999 and haven’t missed a year since.
ScienceLogic: What makes you want to come back each year for the additional punishment?
Cummings: Working with the team, which are long-term established friendships at this point. That and the excitement of working with the new technologies as they or even before they come out.
ScienceLogic: In Las Vegas you were Team Lead for Help Desk. What are you going be doing in NY?
Cummings: Same thing. That position incorporates some management over the show floor and off-show floor area. That’s kinda where they put me and I’ve been doing it solidly for about 5 years.
ScienceLogic: What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the show over the years, what sticks out?
Cummings: The amount of monitoring that we have and what we do with it has really been changing. We went from more, to almost none and now back to more. We’ve been through numerous vendors and apps over the years and until recently weren’t overly happy.
ScienceLogic: Did the integration between Service Desk and Monitoring that ScienceLogic created help streamline things in a meaningful manner?
Cummings: Absolutely. In the short time that we have to get things setup there’s no way to integrate multiple products in this area. Having things pre-integrated allowed us to quickly link network events and the related tickets together in the management system [EM7].
ScienceLogic: Moving forward on the Service Desk, do you think you can move away from your current paper driven process to a completely paperless process?
Cummings: I could potentially see it changing as we get the process down and fine tune it. We might be able to get an electronic interface for people. It’s tough. There’s always going to be an aspect of the shows we have to hand off on paper and get to legacy people such as electricians and movers.
ScienceLogic: If there was one thing you could improve that you think would make the overall show or help desk operate better, what would it be?
Cummings: We need to keep refining processes down to get information into EM7. Get better at using the integration and automation that already exists in EM7.
Popularity: 24% [?]
July 23rd, 2008
July 22nd, 2008 by Julia Lim
We had the pleasure of interviewing client Opus Interactive’s Director of DataCenter Operations at Interop Las Vegas this year, and thought this was a great time to highlight some of the other successes that Opus has had in managing their growth and IT operations.
Like most of the service providers we talk to, they look to virtualization to provide immediate benefits to the business – e.g, cost savings from server consolidation and support for Green IT through cutting power/cooling requirements. And one more dimension to virtualization – Opus launched a new service, vClustr, which is a virtual dedicated server that provides the benefits of a fully managed dedicated server at a fraction of the cost…managed by EM7, of course.
We were happy to help Opus by working with them to implement our EM7 solution. Their growth plan was severely limited by inefficient processes and tools. As Opus grew rapidly in 2006, the tools they had in place were not easy to integrate as they were managed independently. There was a manual billing and ticketing infrastructure in place, and valuable engineer time was spent on maintaining what they had instead of enabling business growth. The company faced a choice, either grow by adding overhead and bodies or grow through automation.
Opus chose automation. They needed an automated solution to cover their immediate needs, and also enable them to scale processes for emerging technologies and future service offerings. Throughout their growth, Opus wanted to maintain their “customer first” philosophy and expand their green efforts.
By choosing EM7, Opus was able to replace their multiple, disparate tools with a single, integrated management system for networks, servers, applications, service desk assets and virtualization infrastructure. EM7 provided automated billing, ticketing, alerts and escalation options as well as a branded customer portal for transparency and self-service ticketing.
The results were tremendous. Opus Interactive recouped $130k per year of engineering resources. They automated critical operations to increase efficiency, enabled proactive monitoring and prepared for growth, while giving the business the processes and tools to grow the business without additional human capital resources.
We’re glad that we could help such a great company achieve their goals of providing an efficient “best-in-class” solution that combined superior customer service with a green philosophy.
Get the entire case study here.
Popularity: 24% [?]
July 22nd, 2008
July 21st, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio
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.
Popularity: 21% [?]
July 21st, 2008
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