Good Demo System For A High-Bandwidth Link? 471
FuzzyDaddy writes "My company is planning on demonstrating a 2.5 Gigabit per second link to some potential customers in the next few months. Now, we have all the equipment needed to measure how well the link is performing, but we'd like to put together a cheap 'Gee Whiz' demonstration. Surely other /.'ers have put together similar demos in the past. What combination of computers, network adapters, and software have you used to demonstrate high data rate links to potential customers?"
video (Score:2, Funny)
Re:video (Score:5, Interesting)
i forgot how long the download was and what they used but it was insanely fast and they used specialized software.
i am sure 100 bonnie's on your link would look nice however.
Mystify them (Score:5, Funny)
Instead, case mod the equipment,throw in a lot of leds and stuff and go on the mystical tour.
customer: So, how fast is it?
you: This is state of the art equipment
you: (pause)
you: no demo would do it justice....
customer: (looking at all the lights)
Re:video (Score:5, Funny)
Then post the site's address on Slashdot.
Boring, Why Not Download the Entire Internet?! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why you should spider the entire internet in real-time. Have a counter oncreen update the number of webpages you've visited. Maybe even flash by the domain names of the sites being indexed.
1 million web page visits a second would be pretty intense.
The problem here is that you'd need a good 100 or more computers to do it. Still, all you'd need would be a simple perl script installed on each of your company's computers.
Personalised Hold-music... (Score:5, Funny)
Back in Napster's hey-day, I knew of a guy who, when answering the phone to customers, would ask them what their favourite song was and then try and pull it off Napster while he was talking to them. Napster + 10Mbit internet connection + a cable from line-out into the phone system, and 80% of the time customers on hold would find themselves listening to their favourite song. Now *that's* a neat bandwidth demo :)
Re:video (Score:4, Interesting)
full frame uncompressed high definition video (Score:2, Informative)
Re:full frame uncompressed high definition video (Score:2)
his bottleneck will be either end I imagine.
"right, now these 20 machines here are all taking a HD video stream off the sevrer over there which has 3GE cards teamed together for speed and all the HD video stored in memory..."
dave
Slashdot it! (Score:5, Funny)
Easy (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.apple.com/trailers
They'll love it.
Microsoft Office System (Score:2, Informative)
finally ! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:dumb question (Score:2)
googlism [googlism.com]
Re:dumb question (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, the only post that offers any realistic answer and it gets modded down. Good news, I guess the crack shipment is in...
Does anyone know the answer to this, or is everyone pretending to find an "in-joke" funny when they really don't have a clue? As the parent parent asked:
WTF has "Hot Grits" got to do with Natalie Portman?
If no one knows, the joke should be banned from Slashdot. ;-) It's as bad as using an acronym for something you don't know what i
Relate in DVDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Relate in DVDs (Score:5, Informative)
If you can show this (videowall) it would be very impressive!
--Blerik
If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with trying to impress the non-techy types is that they usually have a very poor idea of what is achievable using standard technology. I know that in the past when I have showed off my high-speed college internet connection to such people by, for instance, streaming video, the usual response is along the lines of, "So what? My TV can do that."
Unless you know something about how data-intensive digital video is, and have experience with the usual video quality achievable over the internet, a simple 'streaming video' demo, even if it is multiple streams at ridiculous quality, has the potential to bomb.
IMHO.
Having said all that, this was a few years ago, so maybe the average person these days has a better idea about how hard video is over networks. But given the technical knowledge of the average internet user, I would not hold my breath.
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:5, Informative)
"This is two-way video over a 128k link"
"This is two-way video over a 512k link"
and so on. Notch the quality up each time, until you get to full-screen two-way TV with your link.
Video does seem to be the easiest bandwidth-soak to set up, but everyone's seen it now. It's not exactly gee whiz.
Maybe a simple video-on-demand demo, with half a dozen DVD-quality MPEGs at the top end and a set-top box (more than one?) at the bottom would be suit-attractive.
If you want to get clever, choose DVDs with multiple endings so you can offer the user choices as they view (maybe Roadrunner cartoons are short enough and episodic enough to make this work as a demo).
How about a recording of voices? Lay 2 conversations over each other, and say "this is the number of conversations that can be transferred over a 20kbps link".
Add 8 more conversations "and this is a 100kpbs link"
And so on, until you reach a roar of conversation with the high-end link (1/4 million calls? Ok, maybe that's unrealistic).
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but yes, yes I do expect managers to understand what they manage.
If they don't, fire them.
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:3, Insightful)
1. People who don't have a boss, because they are the boss.
2. People who are a boss, but also have a boss.
3. People who work for living, and have a boss.
Usually, the term "manager" describes Type 2. These people can be fired by either Type 1 people, or bigger Type 2 people. Note that Type 1 people still have constraints on their ability to act; they may be overseen by a board of directors, or answerable to major customers - when I say they don't have a boss, I o
Re:If even you don't know what it's good for (Score:3, Informative)
but how exactly is more bandwidth going to help you deal with more seti@home calculations? The application is extremely cpu-bound.. not bandwidth-bound.... you could have infinite bandwidth, but unless you have a football stadium full of supercomputers, you aren't going to go to #23.
use big screen to show off! (Score:3, Interesting)
just get a huge screen with tons of
windows. or even get more then one computer
with big screens. setup so you can
see all the screens from a few meters.
i wouldn't send one huge/large file, say
500 megs since even at 2.5 gigs/sec
it's going to take a while
better send/stream many mpg/avi/etc.
files. that should be impressive
Re:use big screen to show off! (Score:2, Funny)
Sure, almost 2 seconds.
Streaming and booting. (Score:5, Interesting)
That should beat in the fact the bandwith is obscenely excessive.
Re:Streaming and booting. (Score:3, Insightful)
The remote booting will bottleneck in local storage before you even get close to 2.5Gb throughput.
-- Hamster
Can't go wrong with video (Score:5, Interesting)
Also you can repeaditly stream a text version of War and Peace or some other lengthy book, with a counter on the recieving end showing how many times you have downloaded it. Keep a copy of the print edition on the table to show them what is comming down as the counter ticks away.
Re:Can't go wrong with video (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can't go wrong with video (Score:5, Insightful)
Ewan
Re:Can't go wrong with video (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can't go wrong with video (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the first good idea I've seen to impress non-techies
Imagine them looking at a counter going up insanely fast with such a huge book next to the monitor.
Might be a CPU bottleneck, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Start out with what video on the internet looked like back using dialup in 1995 -- postage-stamp sized 8 bit windows running at 8-10 fps with out-of-sync 8Khz mono audio. Move slowly up the resolution and link speed until you get to "today's streaming video", but still displaying only one window of video. During this time, keep the display at something smaller, like 800x600 on a larger display; partly to magnify the pixelization of older/slower video, partly for greater wow factor later on.
At this point, you start talking about your link and you switch the video feed to HD full screen. "And that's not all...." -- switch the display to max resolution (2048 x 1536?), and start adding HD feeds until you've tiled the screen with HD feeds. Keep adding them until you have so many on the screen that they're hard to see or you really have maxed out the pipe.
This is something that ordinary people can grasp; the challenge will be a computer with video display capable of displaying dozens of simultaneous HD feeds, but it will look really cool, especially if you keep the sound going on each station and gradually increase the volume as you add channels for dramatic impact.
Windows update (Score:5, Funny)
I've got it! (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, you're going to have to run this 2.6 Gbps link to my apartment before I can show it to you. You see it's on my computer, and it's, um, nailed down. Yeah.... Nailed down... So, just show up tomorrow with the equipment, and we'll really surpise^H^H^H impress those investors!
Use PCI-X (Score:3, Insightful)
Use PCI-X based cards to minimize CPU utilization. And of course, you should put a decent memory (fast and big enough) if you decide to buffer the transfer -- maybe a PC4000 512MB RAM. Then, if you decide to save the transfer or for the sending part, use a SCSI or SATA based HDD. Everything else can be el-cheapo based, IMHO. You can put a low-end CPU if the CPU utilization is low enough and then boast it in the demo. ;)
For the obvious, make sure you run OS with minimal background processes to reduce CPU overhead. IMHO http-based transfer works wonder for clients interested in "real-world" application.
Re:Use PCI-X (Score:5, Informative)
I know it's lame to answer my own post, but for a possible demo setting, you can put a DVD ISO image at a webpage and get it to the demo computer.
Mathematically speaking, let's say DVD's content is 9.4 GB, which is equivalent to 75.2 GBits. Divide this by 2.5 GBit/sec = 30.08 secs. Since "typical" TCP/IP utilization is roughly 70%, divide this number with 0.7, so the estimated transfer time is roughly 43 seconds, plus some delay if the source is pretty far away from the demo place.
Transfering a full DVD content in less than 1 minute is damn impressive. Just let them taste the "raw" power of the 2.5 GBit link.
If you want to use streaming, make sure you have a high end CPU to back it up. Note that Ethernet is poor in contention management. It would exacerbate multi-client performance, but you can avoid this using FDDI based cards, which some clients find it not desirable. But it can be a good demo if their main motive is for tele-conferencing or whatnot.
If you want to gain more insights, here's [intel.com] an article by Intel. It's their advertisements for IXP, but nevertheless a good read with nice statistics.
Re:Use PCI-X (Score:2)
Re:Use PCI-X (Score:3, Funny)
This is too easy, but I can't resist. You're not having very good sex, are you? ;)
Re:Use PCI-X (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use PCI-X (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, have you ever had sex? I've configured dual-tray 18 spindle raid0+1 on fibre channel and all it was to me was disk storage. But then again, I've had sex with many women.
Re:Use PCI-X, troll response (Score:5, Interesting)
The bus has nothing to do with it, its the card and how it (Drivers primarily but also bus interface, buffering, etc) has been implemented. We transfer 300+MB/s sustained across shared PCI-X 100Mhz slots with less than 10% CPU load, the source is a second (133Mhz) PCI-X card that is feeding the two shared slots.
Make sure that the system you are using has enough PCI-X channels. Most motherboards that have SCSI/SATA down on the motherboard tend to share the PCI bus with the wrong slots. For this reason we run a 3 PCI-X slot motherboard which has minimal integration on the motherboard. This allows us to use one PCI-X 133 slot for the dual U320 SCSI controller (SATA isn't ready for this yet) and the other two slots to run multiple high definition channels (uncompressed) at 4:4:4 sampling. Thats quite a bit more bandwidth than we are talking about here. The system runs so clean that I have played Q3 in the foreground while all of this is going on. Oh, and this was all happening on Windows XP Pro.
I would also suggest that whatever you try to send, use UDP not TCP/IP.
Its not the motherboard, its not the OS, its not the slot. Its the engineering and not the kind that comes out of reading press releases.
1 terabyte backup to remote site in < 7 mins.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1 terabyte backup to remote site in 7 mins.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1 terabyte backup to remote site in 7 mins.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1 terabyte backup to remote site in 7 mins.. (Score:2)
Re:1 terabyte backup to remote site in 7 mins.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multimedia (Score:2, Interesting)
Shiny Videos and colourful booting Computers are great - not just seeing files flying around...
What about mass-streaming a video of your company (or a nice scenery of a movie, everybody can enjoy - like monster inc) with Video LAN Client [videolan.org] ?
Or one huge conference with high-end webcams ?
Talk to marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can find out why your customers would need a 2,5Ghz link, and find the software that would demonstrate that your offering meets that need, you'll have no trouble selling it to them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Zigacktly (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me that you understand what I need, I already assume you know what you have to sell. I need convincing that you know how to keep me happy.
And you can't assume I have ANY idea how much data is involved in sending HDTV or any other 'consumery' signal. I'd avoid TV as a demo at all costs! If my cable hookup and FREE set top box can handle it wtf does your big connection cost so much for???
You already had the right idea, (Score:2, Funny)
Unfortunately you forgot a link.
We'll demonstrate its capacity, or lackof therein, for ya
bandwidth tricks (Score:5, Interesting)
the CITI project used to manage the switches is, among other things, a secure remote invocation architecture that we use for a related network testing and performance-oriented umbrella project. that project's ultimate goal is to provide a distributed, real-time router-to-router traffic analysis system for use in optimizing campus networks and isolating networking failures. check our the web page if it's of interest.
d
.
V R M L (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, pretend like it's 1995 and create your own mall!
-rt
Real-time File Replication (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me know how long it takes. I need numbers to justify upgrading the T1.
Darth McBride
Gee Whiz? Gee, don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking for myself, any additional "Gee Whizzery" would at best distract me from your take-home point -- that your network is really fast.
At worst, it would make me wonder why you were trying to distract me, and what you might be hiding, glossing over, or leaving for the fine print.
Now, there are a few things that you could do to make a more effective presentation. Despite years in the business, I still sometimes have a hard time grasping the size of Gigabytes, or remembering how Gigabytes compare to Mebibytes (that's not a misspelling; I'd include a link if I weren't typing on my handheld) to kilobits. I guess that.s why ls and df have a -h switch.
A nice chart showing your speed and bandwidth in terms of Tom Clancy novels per minute, or (umcompressed) Wagner operas per hour, would tend to bring those numbers home.
And for the suspicious, so would demonstrating downloads against encrypted and uncompressable data, so no one has to wonder how much of your speed came from on the fly adaptive Huffman encoding.
Basically, if what you're selling is speed and bandwidth, demonstrate that. Saavy customers aren't going to be swayed by booth girls or Barney the Dinosaur, and saavy customers won't want to waste time on that. If you're still aching to spend money, have a nice lunch delivered during the demo (after you've asked your customers about any dietary restrictions they have).
Re:Gee Whiz? Gee, don't (Score:3, Informative)
The inconsistency was deliberate and appropriate.
Target demo to their application (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone in need of such a high speed connection will want it for some reason/application.
1. Find out what that application is.
2. Find out how they measure the performance of you product for their application. They will have some Key Performance Indicators for it.
3. Make a demo that shows the strengths of your product for _that_ application (include their jargon and KPIs)
4. Try to make it visually appealing (this might include additional streaming videos or book download counters as suggested by others here to insert a 'fun factor'. Who says demos need to be boring?).
Know who is coming to listen to / look at your demo. Techies will look for different KPIs than managers. Don't think what will impress you, think what will impress them.
Good luck
Never underestimate ... (Score:2, Funny)
Now, if you could dematerialized said truck in one place and rematerialize it on another, that would be a suitably impressive demonstration of how much bandwidth you system can carry.
Simulate some slower connections first... (Score:5, Interesting)
Do a 'time machine' demonstration. Throttle the bandwidth to, say, 56k and explain that this was 'The Internet' ten or twelve years ago. Demonstrate some moderately taxing application for the time (like a large download).
Take the audience forward in time by increasing the bandwidth slightly. Note how the previous application just zips by now, but start a new application that's still slow.
Repeat a few times going through a sequence something like: download large file, surf web, audio, tiny little image of fuzzy movie, voice-over-ip, real-time video with crappy quality, real-time high-quality video.
End the presentation with a question mark: every new level of bandwidth made previous uses easy, and enabled new applications that really needed the bandwidth. What will be the new application that makes you glad you have 2.5Gb?
Re:Simulate some slower connections first... (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? 10-12 years ago the median speed for net access was NOT 56K. it still was a happy 1.5mbps I had T-1's installed over 15 years ago, and have a pair of HP routers sitting here that are 16 years old. Top speed was near 10mbps with a T-3 (speed limited by the router capabilities NOT the Link) Remember T1 and T3 lines are massively old.. I messed with my first T1 line in 1984 and the correct colorado routers or other high end equipment that allowed you access to those speeds... it was insanely expensive, just like this horribly oversized link being demonstrated.
I suggest that the person does NOT do this. If there is one person with the customer that knows his stuff, you instaltly discredit your entire product/company with a piece of wrong information like this. it will lose the sale, tarnish the company and probably get you fired.
2.5 Gb where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Between remote offices? That is much better. It allows for things like multi-camera video conferencing or multiple simultaneous conferencing sessions.
It also lends itself to "location transparency" demos -- where it doesn't matter where in your system the resouce is, it acts like it is right at your fingertips.
For example, realtime video/audio editing of multiple tracks while the raw data is stored on a SAN in one building and the editing horsepower is in a different building -- and you're in a third just piping the interface.
Large scale CAD/Design reviews, with people being able to mark up and manipulate 3D imagery in real time, regardless of where on your net they're at.
Your big problem is going to be device latency. Spinning drives up, delays in software starting, etc. is going to be much more noticable. Bandwidth like that is great once the bits start flowing, but getting it started and keeping it filled will be taxing.
Unless you do testing that generates obscene amounts of data -- like collecting data from a supercollider, etc.
-Charles Hill
Re:2.5 Gb where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, a good use for 2.5 Gb/s is connecting large remote offices. 2.5 Gb/s can allow office A to connect to some 83 standard hard drives in office B like they were right inside the machine. It could connect 25 machines with maxed out 100baseT networking...basically, it could completely eliminate the need for redundant servers at the second office. And no need for a large second IT department.
This line is the kind of thing which would make it worthwhile to open a second office in a cheaper environment. Run it from your small corporate office in the city to the "office where work actually gets done" in the boondocks and you'll suddenly be able to perform YOUR CHOICE of hiring twice as many competent workers, or doubling the salary of all your Chief Officers.
why risk failure ? (Score:2, Funny)
What Do Your Customers Actually Want? (Score:5, Interesting)
2.5Gbps from a single server would be pretty fun to see. Maybe get a screen capture of that 200MB unreal tournament demo downloading. But at 320MB/s it would be "d'oh missed it"
But if its just 2.5Gbps distributed to a bunch of servers, then, sorry, I just don't see that as being too impressive.
Most decent data centers will have that kind of bandwidth. If fact for about $x0,000 any joe shmoh can buy themselves a couple of gige cables and a rack of servers from a good bandwidth provider.
You want to know what will impress your customers? Just ask them: "Hey guys, what is it exactly you were looking for?".
Me, being in the Linux Virtual Private Server [rimuhosting.com] hosting business, I want to see the following:
If your customers are looking at 2.5Gbps of bandwidth for an intranet backup solution then they'll probably be impressed by other things.
Reliability is at least as important as speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Try to intersperse speed "gee-whiz" moments with tidbits about the reliable infrastructure. Talk about how their whole business rides on this link and you know how important it is. Serve a few gigs of content to 100 clients simultaneously. Show a diagram of the backup power systems that support every piece of equipment involved in the link. Make a remote backup of a big important database. Show how reliability is enhanced by the redundant fiber routes you chose, so there's no single point of failure. Do something that utterly flattens their current connection, and show how it doesn't even faze the new one. Then yank a card while it's running and show how 1:1 failover works.
If you've got a similarly absurd amount of CPU to throw behind this link, set up a cluster of Freenet nodes and watch it all slow to a crawl.
If you want more than potential, show them useful (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, downloading a movie quickly probably won't impress most people in the slightest what with digitial TV and Tivo it will still just look like bad video on a computer monitor.
Now if you target your market for people who could really benefit from high speed internet, like for example, decreasing a companies national payroll download from a day to a minute, you might make some headway.
If you can't think of an use for the tech ... (Score:4, Redundant)
Seriously if this 2.5 Gigabit per second link has any real business application for these customers then you should have no trouble thinking up uses.
I get that you asked for a gee-whiz type application but if the faster line is sooooo good surely then surely there's something in your potential customers business that will benefit from it. Nothing more gee-whiz than a solution to an exiting problem or a new oppurtunity for them.
BitTorrent (Score:2)
Access Grid (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.accessgrid.org/ [accessgrid.org]
It's got a pretty-good 'wow'-factor, and is one of those things that people instantly want at their own site. The coolest thing is that it scales; it runs on hardware ranging from a laptop with a webcam to a custom-build facility.
Remote vision (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who were giving the demo were the Internet2 [internet2.edu] crew - they would know what bits you needed to make this work.
Re:Remote vision (Score:3, Informative)
Surely that is more a low latency demo than a high bandwidth one?
My Way (Score:2, Funny)
Monkeys (Score:2, Funny)
Check how SUNET did it (Score:5, Informative)
http://proj.sunet.se/E2E/
MyDoom (Score:3, Funny)
Not a serious suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
works best if your clients are 13yr old script kiddies.
Slashdot (Score:2)
Ideas for a demo (Score:3, Informative)
If you feel up to it, you can also suck up a little. If they're in architecture, art, film or music, take some examples of their work (not anything illegal or infringing,) encode them in insanely high resolution or bitrate, and get them off of your own server while you're there. If they're an engineering firm, go over to the US Patent Office site at uspto.gov and grab some high-quality pictures of the patents your client has been awarded. If they're a bank or brokerage or something dealing with numbers, show them databases the size of the entire state of Nebraska, after downloading them in just a few seconds. Lawyers and doctors need to access huge amounts of data (court rulings, medical records, what have you) so you could get online and show them how quickly you can locate obscure references. Educational institutions probably already have a nice big broadband, but access to online publications and research materials, as well as very fast and efficient inter-library catalog software running over the internet, can make the higher-ups in the school submit totally to your every whim.
Remember, if you're talking to managers, use the terms "efficient," "on-demand," "more/most cost-effective," and "the bottom line." Synergize!
comparison (Score:2)
How about having a T1 or a.n.other (45mbs) link trying to do the same thing. They need something to compare against.
Now compare the costs!
Forget video... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Connecting multiple offices together (with many hosts) so they can work in harmony instead of waiting hours to finish transfering something and playing solitaire while they wait.
2) Providing access to (a) storage area network(s) which could be used to store all their backups which eliminates the hassle of using tapes.
3) Connecting a HUGE number of hosts together with a few routers and tons of switches.
4) Providing room to grow.
If you can't demonstrate many hosts utilizing the link simultaneously, the next best thing would be to show one host transfering a backup of the OS or a large database. Just be sure that the computers you use have hard drives (RAID's if you're only using one host on each end) that are fast enough to keep up with the link.
Just do a simple comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Download a file over a 100mBit or even 1gB and then do the same on the 2.5 gBit link.
Other than that its all numbers and figures about how many users a network using a 2.5gBit backbone can handle...
Backups and realtime mirroring (Score:5, Interesting)
Then use the server for your daily uses, say file sharing or whatever. Demo the server playing DVDs, streaming across the network, capturing realtime video etc. Do both reads and writes.
When they ask what this has to do with the link, casually point out that all disk activity is happening simultaneusly on the other end of the link, and if the building is hit by an errant meteor or something, no data will be lost.
Then pull the plug on the raid array, and let the mirror take over remotely. If that does not impress them, they are not technical enough to understand what the point is anyway.
In that case, stream porn.
-Charlie
Re:Backups and realtime mirroring (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, if the company set up a transcontinental link for a demo, good for them, but damn they
The station wagon benchmark! (Score:5, Funny)
That should be clear as crystal and plenty gee-whiz enough:^)
No data found (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a wireless link? Is it a LAN type segment? A campus/MAN type segment? Is it copper? Is it fiber? Is it cheaper than OC-48 (which is also a 2.4Gbps link, and has been in use for many years now)?
What is your customer base? Anyone with money? Fortune 500(0)(0)(0)? Universities? Office Parks?
This is like saying "I have a car, where should I drive it", without mentioning that your car is a Mini Cooper and you are on the island of Nevis.
More Data... (Score:4, Interesting)
What we are looking for is an eye-catching way to demonstrate actual working technology. We're not trying to demonstrate that what we're offering is useful - they know that - but were trying to get them interested in it by showing them working prototypes, so they go home knowing we have real hardware.
What I'm looking for is a simple demo - if I'm doing video streaming, what hardware and software could I get that would be relatively cheap and easy to set up that would demonstrate the technology is working? What NIC should I be using? What OS? What sort of memory? What kind of performance could I expect out of an off the shelf PC?
Cost Savings. (Score:5, Informative)
NFS Swap (Score:3, Flamebait)
Boot KDE or Gnome.
High bandwidth link demo (Score:3, Informative)
If you really wanted to demonstrate such a high bandwidth link AND really impress the clients, why not show them something really practical... Create an iSCSI based mini-SAN.
What I would do is use a software based iSCSI target like the one from Ardis Technologies [ardis.com] and use it to share out a ram-drive. Obviously, you would need a machine with a fair amount of horsepower and quite a bit of RAM, but when you will be able to demonstrate transfer speeds of 250 Megabytes a second, that should be able to adequately show just how fast this link is.
You MIGHT be able to get that speed in a burst from SATA Raid or SCSI Raid, but I doubt you would be able to sustain it - this is why I am recommending a ramdrive.
@2.5Gb/s the bottleneck isn't the network... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only things I can think of inside a computer that can sustain 2.5Gb/s throughput are the front side bus and the AGP slot, assuming you have 4x or better on the AGP. If you're transmitting data, it has to come from somewhere, though, and unless you've got a VERY sizeable RAMdisk on hand, you're not going to impress people with moving files from one place to another -- you'll saturate the drive(s) the data is stored on well before you hit the capacity of the pipe.
2.5Gb/s is good for network backbones right now, and not much else. Well, it's great for anything involving data tranfer, obviously, but it's also overkill and therefore probably costs too much, and therefore not so great. But the performance, certainly, sings.
My best advice? Come up with some kind of network oriented demo that involves a many-node network, the nodes each equipped with very fast UltraSCSI 320 RAID-0 arrays so they can try to saturate the pipe.
what turns your customers on ? (Score:5, Insightful)
DoS SCO (Score:4, Funny)
How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno... Just may work!
Contrast is key. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have one computer (the one on the 2.5gbit link) streaming 300 DVDs in realtime, and another computer streaming 1 with an exremely jerky and possibly laggy DSL/cable connection, it will allow people to grasp the depth of the situation. Just showing that it's blindingly fast won't do anything for you if you can't provide a baseline from which the average joe can compare.
Somebody else suggested having it download "war and peace" over and over, while having a hard-copy sitting nearby so you could have something tangible to say "All of this information is being transferred from office to office in a matter of seconds. With this kind of highspeed link, e-mails with attachments the size of the statue of liberty would be received almost instantly." etc.
Geeks know what 2.5gbps gets you. Real people don't, and you need some way to contrast the power of their current internet connection with the power of the new proposed one.
Doing multiple things at once, if not the playing of multiple DVDs, is what's going to win people over. Streaming video gets the layperson response of "My TV does that" (as another commenter pointed out). However, if you can have a computer displaying every single cable channel available all at once or something along those lines, then THAT would be impressive to the average joe. Or perhaps a video conference with hundreds of remote parties? Each client connection would have its own bi-directional video stream, such that the clients could see the person doing the presentation, and the person presenting can tile 100 windows on a 2048x1280 (or whatever high resolution) screen, all showing a different person in a different place all in fluid motion, in realtime.
Do a comparison show (Score:3, Informative)
A good idea would be to have the fastest connection these guys already have compete against this connection for uploading/downloading something (backups, movie, etc.) and have the status display behind you show just how amazingly fast this new line is. Since they already know that the "old" line is really fast, this should really blow them away because then they'll have something to compare your new line to, and thus they can really see what this new line can do for them.
Management usually aren't techies and don't understand how much bandwidth a movie takes up, but they do know how to compare things, that's their job. So, if you do a comparison presentation, I can bet it will go over really really well.
What about the Internet2 Folks?? (Score:4, Informative)
They've got to have a bunch of high-bandwidth tests.
If you have trouble contacting them, I have a friend that works with them through Educause [educause.edu].
T
Good high-bandwidth site (Score:3, Funny)
They've spent the last few weeks re-engineering the site to handle some unusually high throughput.