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InteropNet's Colossal Task

Think you're under pressure? Then spare a thought for the IT manager who has just four days to build a network capable of supporting more than 18,000 people, working with 24 different vendors and a permanent IT staff of just two people.

This is the Herculean task facing Glenn Evans, lead engineer at the Interop trade show, which kicks off at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas next week.

"Realistically, the biggest challenge is making the thing happen in a short period of time," he told Byte and Switch. "We start building the network on Tuesday, April 25th and the first deliverable is on Saturday 29th April, when registration starts."

Evans, who has worked on InteropNet for the past ten years, says that like many of his counterparts elsewhere in the IT industry, he has had to rethink his storage strategy this year.

"This is the first time that we have used a large storage array to support us," he explains, adding that the device will be used as a "holding repository" for video content. "We have never really had the need for it [before] -- this is the first year that we have attempted to stream video and grab content."

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