The storage system, which has been loaned by IBM for the duration of the six-day show, is a RAID 5, disk-based RDM array with a 7-Tbyte capacity. Because this is uncharted territory, however, Evans is uncertain how much storage he actually needs. "We're not really sure," he says, adding that, as well as keynotes, lab sessions, and discussion events, he is also toying with offering a virtual tour of the Interop Network Operations Center (NOC) at the Mandalay Bay.
Other sites within the conference will also be generating video, according to Evans. "We have a number of security-style cameras around the network -- we will be grabbing content from those for the likes of Webcasting and also to keep an eye on things," he says.
The storage array is hooked up to three media servers from Sling Media and two HP DL320 web servers running Apache on Linux, which will be used to serve the content to the outside world.
A total of around 60 people are involved in building the show network, although only Evans and one other person are full-time Interop employees. Around a quarter of those involved are volunteers, and the remainder are loaned from vendors along with the kit.
But Evans says that suppliers who are traditionally at each others' throats manage to put their differences aside for the duration of the show. "There's little or no infighting," he explains, despite the fact that InteropNet relies on around two dozen different vendors, from big names like IBM and HP, to networking monitoring startup Gigamon.
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