As always with eNet, the stakes are high: One minute of downtime is equivalent to a day's worth of downtime in a corporate network, its designers say. And this week's eNet at Las Vegas is bigger -- and more complex -- than ever, with $8 million of network gear, 1,000 network drops, 12,000 nodes and 850 booths, each with at least a 10/100-Mbps Ethernet connection. The show network runs on Extreme Networks' Layer 3 gigabit switches, and its topology looks a lot like a MAN (metropolitan area network) with its series of fiber rings, says Dan Backman, IP carrier systems engineer for Extreme and a member of the eNet team. The eNet team opted again for the OSPF-based ring topology it used at the Atlanta show last fall, rather than the massive star topology of last year's Vegas show network. "Because we have routed links everywhere, it's easier to monitor the state of the network," Backman says.

Aside from new multi-instance OSPF code in the Jupiter routers, this year's eNet has some other new features. VoIP (voice over IP), which was limited to a test bed at the Atlanta show, is now part of the operational show network. Most of the telephones in the eNet NOC (network-operations center) and network-services area are IP, and some IP phones are stationed on the show floor for attendees, too.

Even with the new VoIP traffic, Cummings says he doesn't expect to need much QoS (Quality of Service) since the network is overengineered. The eNet team will closely watch the network links for signs of trouble and offer QoS to exhibitors who want to demonstrate how to prioritize IP traffic.

Despite the high-profile nature of eNet, the management team has security well in hand and sets few restrictions on what exhibitors can do on the network. Most set up their own LANs in their booths and use eNet mainly for Internet access. They are permitted to monitor eNet traffic and equipment, with the exception of the external routers. "The only thing we discourage is hacking into others' systems," even for simulation reasons, Cummings says.

Demonstrations of interoperability among vendors' products, however, is highly encouraged. In fact, N+I's live interoperability demos first set the Interop show apart from other industry events. The show's interoperability testing showcase, known as iLabs, demonstrates how different vendors' implementations of emerging technologies run together (or not). It acts as an incubator for technology not yet ready for prime time.

"We don't panic if something doesn't work, and we do everything we can to make it work," says Geoff Horne, senior network engineer for iLabs, which has a network connection to eNet. "I've seen Cisco and Nortel programmers on their laptops writing new code that gets rolled into their products."

Among other things, iLabs is demonstrating how IP telephony integrates the public switched network. It shows attendees how to build an IP telephony network with Class 5 carrier switches in the middle, doing either traditional or IP voice. ILabs also is testing PKI (public key infrastructure), MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) and SAN (storage-area network) implementations.

Last year's iLabs technology often becomes this year's production technology for eNet, as was the case with VoIP. Look for more VoIP and wireless in upcoming show networks, eNet planners say, as well as streaming-media repositories and cache demonstrations. Multigigabit speed will become more prevalent, too.