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 205 nodes in the official show network. They broke down as follows:
- 73 switches (Enterasys and Netgear),
- 4 routers (Enterasys),
- 28 power distribution units (APC),
- 5 IDSes (Enterasys Dragon),
- 20 environmental monitors (APC),
- 2 load balancers (Coyote Point),
- 2 VMware servers,
- 5 DNS and DHCP Servers (BlueCat Networks),
- 27 IP KVMs (Avocent),
- 27 IP Power Strips (Server Technologies),
- 1 Master Wireless Controller (Aruba Networks),
- 2 IP-PBX Boxes (Digium Asterisk),
- 4 Optical Taps (NetOptics),
- 1 Splunk server and
- 4 external WAN links (Qwest).
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.
