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By Brian Boyko
Glenn Evans cheekily lists his title as “Supreme Ruler” on his official Interop badge. This is no delusion of grandeur. He’s the Lead Network Engineer for Interop, and we had a chance to sit down with him and ask him some questions about what setting up a major network installation in a conference center over a short period of time entails.
Glenn Evans: It takes about seven or eight months of the year just to get Interop rolling. We start with an RFP process about six of seven months out for the show. For example, for the 2007 show year, we started our RFP process in October of 2006. We send out a generic request where the basic design parameters are that you have to build a network that operates across the show environments – that’s exhibit floor and conference space – and it has to work and be capable of no downtime.
We ask the vendors, requesters, or whatever we want to call it – what can you bring to the table? We then get responses back from a number of vendors across all facets of the networking industry. We filter through those and make our final selections, and that’s who the sponsors are going to be.
From that stage, we go to the vendor design phase. In general, when we’re selecting the vendors, we put a basic design in mind, and we select vendors based around that. We then sort of go in and refine the design, streamline it. That usually starts about January of the show year with a general meeting in our offices in San Francisco, bringing the vendors together and hash everything out. I sort of explain my expectations, what I’d like to do, and then we all work together to bring them to fruition.
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NPD: What would be the best way to explain the size of this network?
Glenn Evans: There’s probably a number of ways to do it. We could talk sheer volume – meters of cable. We’ve got about seven kilometers of fiber optic cable that’s specially made for us. We have about 20 to 25 kilometers of Cat-5 cable. It hasn’t obviously been made for us, but we’ve designed it to be easier to implement on the show side. On the show floor, we have approximately 800 ports of 10/100/1000 POE. We use a 10-Gigabit fiber-optic backbone. Probably the other interesting step is that we use a Class A address space. The other interesting factor is that we’ve got about 135 Megs of Internet transport – 3 45 Megabit T3/DS3s.
NPD: How long do you have to get this set up on the show floor?
Glenn Evans: Our process has been streamlined over the 20 years we’ve been doing this show. We generally do what we call a hot-stage in a warehouse in Belmont, California, approximately a month out from the show. We get all the gear in from the vendors, put it in the middle of the room and start to build the network. During that time, we test our designs, modify if required. Every bit of cable that comes to the show is tested, so by the end of the two-week hot-stage period, we’ve got a baseline. It then gets broken down – it’s designed in a modular format – so we break it down, get it into two 53-foot semi trailers, and ship it to Vegas. We then have essentially four days to install the network, before our first deadline. That installation includes the installation of the fiber-optic and copper cable, as well as the electronics.
NPD: How long have you been doing this?
Glenn Evans: I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. I first started as a volunteer, back in Australia.
NPD: What has been your biggest success – you know, the “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat” moment from Interop over the past 10 years?
Glenn Evans: I think probably one of the worst or best moments has been, a few years ago, we had issues with static electricity creating problems with our active electronics, which required a rebuild of our cabling plans the night before the show was due to open. It was quite a modification of the cable plan.
NPD: Anything else you want to add?
Glenn Evans: Performance here – what you guys are blogging about - there’s a lot of performance monitoring, that’s one of the key things we’re doing with the network, just to make sure it does perform as designed. We’ve had five vendors in there, for those vendors it’s a great showcase.
