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INTEROP LOCATIONS: LAS VEGAS • TOKYO • MUMBAI • NEW YORK |
So Hawaii just went through a tense couple of hours as we waited on the data to come in off the mid pacific buoys in regards to a possible tsunami from the 8.3 earthquake in Samoa. What this really started me thinking about was business continuity and just how would my school, my lab or my home recover from a natural disaster? Well no tsunami, but lots of folks were thinking about “what if”.
I just got a press release from the folks at Network Instruments celebrating their 15th anniversary. This Minnesota garage startup founded by CEO Roman Oliynyk and President Douglas Smith has had a long time relationship with the InteropNET Team especially as the world of networking learned how to talk to each other.
It was October 2005 when Oliver Rist, Paul Venezia and I ran a pretty big Identity Management Shootout in my Hawaii lab for InfoWorld Magazine. Wayne Rash and I also ran a Security Event Manager shootout in September of the same year.The gist is that the industry was showing a whole heck of a lot of interest in how identity related to security events and that security events need to be cross correlated across multiple platforms and woven throughout the enterprise.
With hotel WiFi getting both more expensive and more congested I’ve personally started carrying my own instant hotspot with me. What has changed is that the 3G carriers have finally also caught on and are finally providing carrier supported devices. Here are a few from folks like: Sprint and Clearwire and some 3rd party solutions by WalkingHotSpot, Cradle Point and AutoNETmobile.
So as I’ve been diving ever deeper into the virtual world I’m realizing it’s the storage cost that’s the barrier to adoption rather than the servers. The reality is that production quality storage systems are expensive for a reason. (management, reliability, migration, interoperability, etc) However, how does one get across the training bridge from simple VM Hosts to a Virtual environment with a Storage Area Network (SAN)? The answer is open source, and the flavor I’m playing with right now is OpenFiler and I’ve installed it on a Dell PowerEdge 2800 server that I had lying around the lab.
My overall goal has been to retire all my older inefficient servers and slowly migrate over to higher efficiency blade servers. The downside has been the huge bite in my budget that a fiber channel or iSCSI SAN is going to put me back. Why a SAN and not just use my internal disk drives? Easy, VM mobility and how a VM can move from a shared blade to a dedicated blade to multiple blades that are load balanced. This kind of juggling act only comes from the VM’s being stored on a SAN (of some sort) that can be readily accessed by all the computers in the cluster.
The InteropNET is billed as the world’s largest temporary network and over the years has visited places like: Tokyo, Sydney, Frankfurt, Paris, Mumbai, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and many others. At one time the InteropNET had a seven city world tour. It’s made possible by a cadre of volunteers (YES, VOLUNTEERS!) that design, build, run and then tear down a network similar in size to a large office building. These folks have all applied with a mini resume posted to the volunteer site, then the InteropNET staff will pick the folks that fit the needs of the team. We’re looking for skills, but also willingness to work with the rest of the team, and ability to play well with others. The message you really need to take home on this is that you’ll be working with some of the best in the industry, people that have written a very large number of the Internet RFCs and have designed a massive number of new Internet technologies.
Let’s be clear: I think virtualization is better than sliced bread and greener than Kermit the Frog. As a tree hugger, I love the fact that I’m turning off quite a few of my older inefficient servers and saving a whole lot of electricity. My carbon footprint is shrinking in leaps and bounds, but my frustration level also skyrocketed up until a few months ago when I started hearing about how network test tool vendors are addressing the virtualized environment.
Back in March I announced the NOC Yearbook, which features profiles for of the volunteers who helped construct the InteropNet at Interop Las Vegas 2009. It was a big hit – almost 60 people were profiled in the yearbook for the event.
We’ve added some new functionality that will let us create yearbooks for for our events going forward, and just as importantly, for events that happened years ago.
It might come as a surprise to many that not only are there different major types of DVDs but those major types dramatically affect just how much a stack will cost AND how long the data can be trusted before corruption. The gist is that the dyes used as the writable layer vary widely, and those blue bottom disks are super cheap, but also don’t last very long — only a couple years if you’re to believe Larry Jordon in his article on this very topic. I first had to research this very topic when I managed to afford a DVD copier robot (Primera in this case) and had a vendor get up on a soap box for nearly 20 minutes on this very topic. Being the skeptic that I am, I had to research this out, especially since this vendor had a reputation of trying to upsell everything. Considering that NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) has a document on that very topic has lead me to believe that Mr. Jordon really is onto something.
So 3M corporation is one of those odd companies that has over the years produced some amazing technology, but has somehow had lots of problems marketing these inventions. My all time favorite is the Volition duplex fiber optic system (we used this for years on the Interop show) that is amazingly inexpensive, durable (we found a knot in the fiber pulled tight and it still worked), but most importantly fast and easy to terminate. Simple enough that I’ve taught PTA mom’s how to terminate the fiber on a school project, and with 75% of the connector being reusable, the training is cheap too. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about in this article, in this case I’m going to let the cat out of the bag on those super cool touch sensitive glass computer displays you’re started to see at museums and such. Apparently this is also a 3M product line that no one has heard about.
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Sep 29th, 2009 |