Q&A with Sergey Katsev of Coyote Point Systems

August 5th, 2008 by Julia Lim

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.

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Related Posts

• July 23, 2008 -- Q&A with Barry Cummings, InteropNet Help Desk Lead
• July 21, 2008 -- Interop NY 2008 Hot Stage: A Tale of Two Cities
• 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: Coyote Point, EM7, Equalizer, Interop, InteropNet, ScienceLogic

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