loopback0 – Douglas Gourlay's Blog Data Centers, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing

Interop 2010

Arista Booth getting some visitors and traction

Am settling back into a more normal pace and frame of mind after Interop and the launch of the Arista 7500.  Pretty busy several weeks I have to say - I have never worked so hard on a tradeshow booth in my life- I was sort of used to it just 'appearing' and then 'appearing again' somewhere else.  I realize now, more than ever what all goes into making these types of events successful and how it takes a small army of often under-appreciated people to make these things tick.

This would be my 14th or 15th year going to Interop, and somewhere around my 20th show (counting Atlanta and New York venues).  I remember working in the NOC, setting up the first multi-vendor MPLS network, and over the years it feeling like a class reunion as much as a tradeshow.

My week sort of went like this...

I showed up in Vegas at the booth over the weekend- we got a really interesting and neat location- right by the door, right next to Cisco, VMWare and Riverbed - all great neighbors!  At one point Donna Shim from Cisco came over to me when I was screwing something together, setting up a demo, placing signage, or something and said, "You are doing booth setup?"  She then started laughing hysterically.  I think that summed it up.  Ted was kind enough to score me a screwdriver and knife that we needed to open up some boxes, or I would still be staring at them wondering how to get my demo working...

Brooke, Sean, Tom, Mark, and I plied our trade for most of Sunday watching things start coming together.  Vanessa from Blazer, our exhibit partner, was a gem on getting a lot of the heavy lifting done, but we were a bit stressed on two main areas: getting our Internet access working was problematic and impeded our demonstrations which were remotely executing; and figuring out how to cool the Ixia test gear in the Arista 7500 demo pod!

The guys from the Switch Super|NAP were amazing and set up a phenomenal looking 10-Rack T-SCIF in our booth area (Thermal Separation Compartment In-Facility) which we then kitted out with about 240 ports of 10GbE, some copper some fiber, in order to showcase some amazing stuff from our partners - Joyent, Greenplum, Adva, Terranetics, Fulcrum, etc...

Getting the largest and highest performance single-device 10Gb Ethernet test working in two racks without special cooling was up to Sean and the great guys from Ixia - JJ and Ali.  After we figured out that the test equipment sort of blew hot air out the front, which our switch then ingested and spit out the back we got to do some crazy engineering - involving what looked suspiciously like a dorm room fan or two, to get the test gear to sort of behave like data center gear.  (For future reference - test and measurement equipment is almost always not designed for front-to-rear cooling)

One thing I love about my job is that EVERYONE is technical and EVERYONE does booth duty - even our chairman and CDO!

By Tuesday morning things were coming together- at one point I was climbing the truss to liberate a wireless AP we needed to reconfigure a bit, and Jeff and Chuck thankfully got that working with about 4 minutes to spare to we could get the vEOS, VM Tracer, and EOS demos up and running remotely.  Whew!

The b'ARISTA got cranking making some good coffee - lattes so good even Stephen Foskett blogged about them!  (and thankfully didn't list us as one of those vendors with no tie ins whatsoever between their tradeshow promotions and their corporate brand)

By 10:15 Tuesday the booth was packed, and it pretty much did not let up until the lights dimmed in the evening each day.  I remembered my Chloroseptic and cough drops - mandatory....

I had a really fun panel discussion with some folks from other networking companies.  These are always kind of fun but marginally awkward as a presenter as well often posing a quandary-  the audiences usually want to learn something, do not want an advertorial, and do want to be entertained.  Us vendors on the other hand almost always do not want to 'get into it' with each other because guys like Mike Fratto and Jim Duffy are always sitting in the audience pen in hand just waiting for it.  A bit nerve-wracking to say the least, but quite fun.

I think everyone on the panel requited themselves well, and while representing our respective franchises points-of-view we also did remind the audience that the great thing about the networking industry, and Interop in particular, is that while we sometimes trade barbs, we all agree our products MUST trade packets and frames.  Multi-vendor interoperability is the name of the game- if there is not that, then we as an industry suffer.

Special shout-out to Jim Metzler for hosting an awesome panel, and several hundred engaged end-users for joining and laughing at my occasional joke.  Martin - glad you appreciated my thoughts on large layer-2 versus tunneled layer-3 designs, and Rick Kagan - thanks for the text messages that vibrated my leg while I was trying to figure out how to respond to Thomas Scheibe on something about FCoE

Wednesday morning was pretty cool.  The Best of Interop awards in the main keynote area was such a great ove by show management - 2, 4, and 5 years ago when I was up for other awards it was in some random part of the tradeshow floor - having it in the Mandalay Ballroom gave them a real Academy Awards feel...  I am sure I speak for everyone nominated and attending when I say that it really made us feel special and made the awards that much ore meaningful to us.  Thank you.

I've been fortunate enough to be part of some great organizations and have a couple Best of Interop plaques around - always from the Infrastructure category   But I never thought that we'd win the big one - the overall Best in Show now that was cool!  I was sitting back off to the right with my iPhone 3GS recording Jayshree hopping up on stage and trying to drag her entourage up with her   (Thanks boss!)

Arista 7500 - Grand Prize, Best of Interop 2010

Racing from there back to our booth area I think half the show came to enjoy a great mocha (thanks Robert!) and see what all the fuss was about with the Arista 7500.  The rest of my day was a blur of meetings, impromptu interviews, and crazy schedules.  We headed out with 40-50 customers at 4pm for a tour of the Switch Super|NAP - an insanely well designed and built data center that is about 5 minutes from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and worth a visit if you are anywhere west of the Rockies.

Thursday was a bit calmer, and around 3pm we started packing things up.  I saw an amazing demo by Aprius of their virtualized I/O system.  It's not shipping yet - but it really looks promising in carrying PCIe over Ethernet, and consolidating FC, Ethernet, disk controllers, SSD, etc all over Ethernet from the host.  Seriously cool.  I did not get to tour the show floor at all and see what other companies were announcing, demonstrating, or showing off - I'll have to read the blogs and catch up on what I missed - am sure there was some awesome technology and products there this week.

Spent many hours responding to blogs, tweets, and lots of emails.  Then the race to pack as much as possible before everyone had to start rushing to the airport to catch flights home was on, and a smile of relief started hitting a lot of the faces I saw around.  A well earned weariness too - a long, but rewarding week, and a very good Interop.  Thanks Lenny!

dg