Q&A with Geoff Horne of InteropNet

June 25th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

Earlier this week I had the chance to sit down with Geoff Horne, Chief Architect for InteropNet, and discuss how he thought things went at Interop Vegas 2008 and how he thinks the lessons learned apply to enterprises.

(Photo credit: The Tech Stop)

ScienceLogic: How long have you been involved with Interop?

Geoff Horne: Since about 1996.

ScienceLogic: How has it been changing? Does the show get more complex with new technologies or because of the constantly changing size of the show?

Geoff Horne: The technologies have changed. Every year there’s a different market environment. Since we build on customer needs, things change every year. Things like ScienceLogic for Network Monitoring actually simplify things, it’s a new thing that Network Management tools are completely web based. In general, it doesn’t really get any better or worse because every year we’re building it again. You don’t get the stability of a standard environment. The upside is that we’re always doing a full upgrade, a full technology refresh and not using old code.

ScienceLogic: Do those kinds of changes influence the types of vendors you look for for InteropNet?

Geoff Horne: The base categories don’t change. You always need to forward packets. You always need switches, you always need routers. We’ve tried to open it up to everyone that has products involved with networks to see if we have the time or space for it.

ScienceLogic: The kind of cooperation that you get between the vendors is what seems to be an unachievable nirvana for Enterprises. What’s the secret to getting 17 vendors to work together in such a short time? Enterprises would kill for that.

Geoff Horne: The honest answer is don’t trust the vendors. If they try and build something the way they want to, its not going to interoperate. You have to pull them out of their safety zone, make them do things that you think the product can/should do to ensure interoperability.

ScienceLogic: In a blog post prior to Interop Vegas 2008 you stated three major goals for InteropNet. They were Education, Monitoring and Statistics. How did you do against these goals?

Geoff Horne: I think we did pretty well. They’re 3 things we really didn’t have before. They’re things that just weren’t focused on the right way. For the first round of changing the focus, changing the way people look at the network (statistics rather than packets), it worked quite well, it gave people a much better idea as to what’s going on.

ScienceLogic: If we look at NY as take two for Interop 2008, are there things you are going to do differently based on lessons learned in Vegas?

Geoff Horne: We’re building more physical redundancy in the core network, geographic distribution of the infrastructure within the show. This will allow us to bring up chunks of the network independently. It isn’t something that we really thought of before. This helps us take the single point of failure (the NOC) out of the equation.

ScienceLogic: Are there any lessons learned from Interop that you think would help enterprises?

Geoff Horne: Visibility is key. Your network is significantly more functional when more people can see what’s going on. If the only guy that can see what’s going on is the guy with his fingers on the terminal, no one can make good decisions. You have to make people loosen up their control so that everyone can see and therefore make educated decisions.

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June 25th, 2008