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Good Demo System For A High-Bandwidth Link?
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?"
Use it to download a WAV file of a car engine.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
that paris hilton video off emule??
I once used a pringles can, 100M of string, and some bubblegum to send a Manchester-encoded bitstream at 5mbps ... ... I am batman!
if you've got the bandwidth end-to-end, go for it
Post a link to it on slashdot and see how long it lasts.
Just take them to
http://www.apple.com/trailers
They'll love it.
Can't beat powerpoint, especially with the online components to integrate voice/video/slideshows/images etc
a /. article where comments about a high-res nathalie portman DVD with hot grits are insightfull, interesting, informative & on-topic !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Download a dozen DVD movies at once and have them all display in real time? That would LOOK impressive at least.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
then you may as well quit selling it. The fact is people who need that sort of performance come looking for it, everyone else can get by fine on 100Mb.
Use it to demonstrate how you can use a remotely mounted disk to simultaneously record/play a zillion-tracks Logic-or Pro Sound project.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
whatever you want.
... ...
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
Start streaming a large uncompressed dvd with VLC. While streaming, remote boot a series of machines off the network (all being console monitored on your current display) while showing live video of a monitor located on the other side of the link connected to the server you are booting/streaming from.
That should beat in the fact the bandwith is obscenely excessive.
--- I do not moderate.
See how many DVDs you can have going @ the same time. Copy some DVD files to a hd (smartripper will do this), and share them over the link. Use a software player like Media Player Classic if on win, or your fav player on linux. Load up multiple instances and see how many of the movies you can stream.
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.
------- Assumption is the mother of all f$#@ ups.
You could get it to download all the security patches for XP, it'll take a while but the download rates should be amazing....
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 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.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
People might like to see how their data is safequarded, you could do a complete backup of 1 terabyte of data in under 7 minutes. That might be, "like WOW." Give a 7 minute presentation during the backup..
Multimedia is the way to go.
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 ?
Or one huge conference with high-end webcams ?
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
As a female pr0n lover I must say, "fuck off".
I wouldn't know about computers and network cards and such, but as for what software to use: ask the marketing department (if you have one)!
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Just OCR and ZIP all of Library on Congress and send it down the wire.
Now that's a good idea. I wonder what they are actually using it for though, surely it would be best to demo whatever the eventual utility would be?
by posting to /.
:-)
Unfortunately you forgot a link.
We'll demonstrate its capacity, or lackof therein, for ya
... but do you're math in bits not bytes... that'd be like 53 minutes in bit time (oops).
Pity the fucking disks can't possibly keep up.
i work at CITI and we've had recently done a few demos with our high-bandwidth link. one setup included two dell dual-CPU servers, one at either end of a gigabit link. we then used iperf to fill the majority of the link with traffic (using other machines). we then used a CITI project with the intervening Summit 7i switches to reserve bandwidth for a video teleconference. we demonstrated the practical capacity of the link and the ability to honor QoS parameters.
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
.
find a way to get /.ed
Hey, pretend like it's 1995 and create your own mall!
-rt
Do a hiqh-quality video conference, with hd, and just keep adding people till they start to degrade.
Try it with a slow link, like ISDN, and then switch to your fast one.
Offer your customers users a klick me e-mail and let them know they just succesfully DOSed your competitors over the same link while your having CounterStrike fun without any signs of lag. :P
Try loading up a server with 2TB of data and then do a full syncronization with a product like this. This should chew up more bandwidth than a simple file copy due to sync overhead.
:)
Let me know how long it takes. I need numbers to justify upgrading the T1.
Darth McBride
EASY... have one server on the farside of the link host several gigs of high quality pornography of the lesbian persuation, then stream said content over the link while listening to streamed audio (because porn music stoped sounding good years ago) and then start a few VoIP calls on the link too.. remember, the more flashing LED's the better it will sell.
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.
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).
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Shut up
Although I'm not a salesperson, I can give you this advice:
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
... the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs
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.
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?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 -eq 1 ]
do
curl -f http://www.goatse.cx/hello.jpg
done
If it is to the Internet, then you're out of luck. 99% of anywhere you go couldn't come close to filling it.
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Eliminate all the possibilities that something could go wrong and make your company look inept, after all, you know the link works, so just assign a likely-looking IP address to the loopback interface, alias 'ifconfig' to one of your scripts that hides this fact, and voila ! You could even say "hmm.. it's faster than we thought.. we'll have to increase charges accordingly" :-)
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
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 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.
Do you really mean to say that you don't know what good your own technology is? One would think you would investigate uses that your potential clients would find beneficial, rather groping around slashdot for a wizzy demo.
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.
... how are you going to sell it?
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.
Modify Mydoom.bleh to hit the server during the time that the clients are there for the demo? *shrugs*
-- Proud member of the Jello Sex Cult.
I've seen so many comments about Natalie and hot grits. I'm sure I'll be ridiculed into oblivion for asking this, but I need to know:
Wtf are "hot grits"?
Become a seed for as many torrents as you can.
You could set up an access-grid node:
http://www.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.
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
How about the DVD of the Encyclopedia Britannica?Or high resolution maps for the US/world.
The people who were giving the demo were the Internet2 crew - they would know what bits you needed to make this work.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
You could do a live install of Win2K while connected and benchmark the incoming worms.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
When my University was showing off its fast long-distance wireless project, to suck students into enrolling, they put a live feed to the monkey cage at the local zoo! Unfortunately it was raining, so the monkeys stayed hidden, and we had a live feed to it raining at the zoo!
bits and peace
Nicholas Daley
Show how you can bring it down in seconds by launching NMAP, nessus, nikto, at it.
Burning a DVD or CD over a link is a very good demo of the link speed/ minimum bandwidth. Unfortunately it can go wrong in the demo and will!!
!
a company i worked at thought it was a great idea to stream copies of Episode 1 over the network to show it off. Never mind the fact that it was just released in theaters a few weeks before...
I was thinking that. When implementing backup systems in a previous job of mine I always used to find that the disk subsystems were the weakest link. 1 Terabyte in 7 mins would need some seriously impressive disk arrays.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
If I've asked you to demo the link because I want to ship out data to my 250 locations in real time rather than overnight, or some other PITA time show me the link talking to >100 locations at once. Even if you're just sending through an arbritary file make sure its of the same order as the data they need to shift.
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???
Invite in a Guinness World Records judge and make the demo event a record attempt on 'Most pr0n transferred on airwaves'
-el
here:
http://proj.sunet.se/E2E/
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Get someone else to do your homework for you!
Sure they can. I've seen plenty of arrays that can keep up with 250MB/s. In fact anything attached to a decent database server or used as central storage for a number of servers better be able to keep up that kind of throughput. For instance Netapp's FAS960C cluster solution can push 2.5GB/s on a synthetic benchmark
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Perhaps it's redundant because even the most retarded
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Just have www.sco.com point to your testing server
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
"As you can see since issuing the ping -f command www.sco.com is totally inaccesible."
works best if your clients are 13yr old script kiddies.
The internet makes me stupid.
p0rn...lots o' p0rn
I had a customer tell me that's all the web is good for
Definetly a nice streaming video demonstration will be the best. Persaduate management to buy few DV cameras and stream their data uncompressed (25 Mbps + audio), of, in example, demonstration meeting at one end of demo link to monitor and some cameras at the other end and back. Also you can add some spicy moments by adding a live feed from caffeteria or CEO and his secretary in live. They will be impressed, you will get a few pricy cameras to sell, a lot of new equipment that was required to set up a demonstration (think Sony W900 x6, dual opteirons x 3, Matrox parhelias all around, a lot of firewire cards) and will get at least some additional bonus, so you will have time to think about your job next time, instead of asking such questions in slashdot.
This has been posted before, but I suggest using a high number of simultaneous video streams. Using 10 computers, each displaying 3 or so DVD windows you should get the idea of pretty obscene bandwidth capacity across.
Just show'em: "Our network is *at least* as fast as the whole tv broadcast world!"
Use it to Slashdot Slashdot.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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!
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Good luck having the disks keep up, or having enough disks to keep up.
OK so you can show your multiple DVD streams on it and download a CD at the same, whilst running a VoIP conversion..
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!
Stick a webserver on it and /. it.
Most businesses won't give a damn about video streaming, especially when it's possible with a 10 Mbps link - you should avoid even mentioning video unless they want to know about teleconferencing. You've got to provide them with reasons why they NEED that fast of a connection. A few obvious things are:
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.
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...
God, root, what is the difference?
If you don't have "another link" to contrast with, use something like dummynet to simulate a lower bandwidth/higher delay channel over your existing link, and use that as contrast.
Surely other /.'ers have put together similar demos in the past.
Uh huh. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that 1% Slashdot readers have access to a link this fast, let alone have had to put on demos for it.
Hmm. Three stories down, it appears as though Intel has a demonstration of "superfast communications technology in excess of 2 Gb/s" next week.
Coincidence? I think not.
Sounds like someone at Intel forgot to do their mental Kegel exercises. "It's done! It's amazing! It lives!" "Umm, wait a minute. How can we actually _demonstrate_ this?"
I suppose turning the convention hall into a 32,000x32,000 full-surround-sound 60-fps digital pornograph would be singularly unwelcome at the developer's conference, but... ah, wait. Never mind. (Only problem is, do they have enough time to do it? And do I have enough time to attend? Problems, problems...)
I am Chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are Free. -Eris
just show em around microsoft datancentres at seattle, they have mutligigabit links to major backbone companies there, to distribute their windowsupdates
geee bugfix.
what r u gonna do with your 2.5 giga link? nobody except buggy companies and useless portals need that. everbody else distributes their content properly, codes proper data with a small footprint, generates much less traffic, and doesnt put up crap-filled websites and monster hosting companies which eath up multiple gigabytes of bandwidth.
nuff said
Ok, so lets call this 2.5 gigabit/s link roughly 800x faster than my connection.
At best, i've reached speeds of 250KB/s here.
Theoretical speed then should be somewhere around 200 MEGABYTES PER SECOND.
So, if you're definition of "a while" is just over 2 seconds, well, then you'd be correct ;-)
Even at 1 gigabit/s (the fastest readily available NIC for a desktop system) it comes in at about 5 seconds. That, I would say is an IMPRESSIVE demo.
Do this with a DVD. And don't just download them, STREAM them in realtime, like SEVERAL... that would rock. I don't know what beast of a machine would handle that though, but good luck.
I wish I got to play with such toys :-(
Ok, there is one thing that will impress the computer savy and admin types, that is real time remote disk mirroring. 2.5Gbps ~= 300MBps, or roughly the bandwidth of an ultra320 SCSI drive. Set up a single channel raid array with 9 drives on an U320 card plugged into a PCI-X slot. Mirror it to the other end of the link.
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
Check out Earthviewer by Keyhole.
It doesn't matter, it's only a demo, the data can just go to /dev/null. The clueless knob-heads viewing the demo won't know any different.
ping -f www.sco.com
No, really, do something like a cool
tar xzf - backmeup/ | ssh remotehost "cat > backup.tgz"
if you have the computing power for a fast ssh transfer
and then you can claim that mankind finaly travels at speeds close to that of light.
Most people are still impressed by streaming video. I would take 3 computers, have 2 of them stream a DVD to the 3rd PC which then plays them both simultaneously. :)
And do it on a Powermac G5 for an extra 'ooh' factor
At that rate you could easily stream a DVD, or maybe some HD-WMA or HD .ts files over it. That would certianly impress me. :-)
Load a station wagon with backup tapes and drive it across the parking lot. At the same time, initiate a huge file transfer. Display the transfer results as % of Station wagon loads/ft.
That should be clear as crystal and plenty gee-whiz enough:^)
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
The parent poster is absolutely right. If these people are paying for an absurdly fast link, they'll probably be absurdly pissed when it goes down.
;)
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.
There isn't enough data in your post to suggest *anything*.
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.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Get 5-7 mac os x servers and netboot and play unsynched video on a few hundred imacs ;) Hey, it worked for apple
If you can really get the full throughput, then I think most people will experience a transfer of a full CD in 2 seconds as pretty impressive.
Or a DVD in 13 seconds. I believe Encyclopedia Britannica fits on a DVD?
Should be a nice demo to transfer the worlds largest encycolpedia in 13 seconds as well.
The problem is to find HW that can read 312MB/sec from disk and at the same time shuffle that out on the network.
Stuff like that are not easy to find...
I would probably put a machine on each side with 8GB of memory or huge ramdisks (BDS can for instance make a tmp fs that is completely in memory).
That way you, you get away from buying a horribly expensive disk RAID and save the bus/memory/CPU bandwidth needed from reading from disk.
three off the top of my head
1) Get a web server on that connection "slashdotted"
2) Write a DDOS virus to attack the customer's web server on their existing connection. Then, hook up your connection. Compare and enjoy.
3) Goatse?
good, presumably you know how much I care
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
...a few people have already mentioned it, but here it goes.
Download some porn/mp3s/warez/movies and show them the speed they'll get.
(That's what they end up doing with it anyhow.)
FLR
2.5 Gbps link: $(undisclosed)
MyDoom.A (22,528 bytes): free
2.5 Gbps / 22,528 byes = 110,973 viruses per second.
Wiping SCO of the face of the net: priceless
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
Show them how you can download the entire Internet in about an hour.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
It's posts like this that make me wish I could get up earlier:
How about downloading Linux distro ISOs? That oughta get 'em foaming.
....ya know, it's too bad you aren't demo-ing the link to us.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Why not do something nerdy like having it calculate a bunch of prime numbers in a distributed fashion.
Post a link from slashdot to your IP!
But there are certian older models of Cisco gigabit switches that catch fire if you run them full load for long enough. Perhaps you can find one of them and let out the magic smoke...
I would suggest that you give a demonstration, especially if you are selling execs, showing how this extra speed can save money. Say show them the speed it takes to Backup the system to an other system. Or ability to run a lot of software off a mount where you only need to install it one system. So saving administration time and perhaps license issues.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That kind of speed could only be used for one thing.... p0rn...
I am part of a company that does real time monitoring, collection, duplication and modification to packets on connections like that. You will find that video is useful, but voip is the coming bandwidth hog. By demostrating that you can handle a very large number of conversations, it is impressive to those that will be interested in such a connection (large companies, Baby bells, Cable companies, and Government).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Its one thing to turn on the echo ports and toss 1Gb back and forth to each other...its another to see what actual file transfers would be like. Of course, then you have to find disks that will keep up...
Thinking of Microsoft...
How about a raw-type(iow, uncompressed) VNC connection? Demonstrate streaming video at its best.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Set up a machine with 4MB of RAM, and NFS mounted root and swap.
Boot KDE or Gnome.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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 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.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Nice regurgitation of half digested technical articles. 3GIO *IS* PCI-express, its just the old name. Oh, and most PCI-X interface controllers have multiple DMA channels allowing you to send data in either direction. In this case a single PCI-X part at just over 500MB/s can more than saturate a 2.5Gb/s link so the fact that the bus is uni-directional during any single transfer is moot. The individual DMA channels have separate buffering allowing very clean and seamless DMA transfers at FULL speed. And BTW, most of this fancy PCI express tecnology you mention *doesn't exist* at the practical level today. The bridge spec was just finished in June of last year and the first compliance workshop was last december and this was for *baseline* PCI express implementations.
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.
That will be 11 minutes if you use the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Reguster the public IP address as www.sco.com
Everybody knows that the definitve unit of measurement for high bandwidth is the Library of Congress.
How many Libraries of Congress can you download in a minute?
That's the gold standard(TM).
but I'll post with my name anyway. I'm not afraid.
It appears to me that if you are asking slashdot how you can best use a connection this fast, you should probably quit your job and give it to someone else who would appreciate it more. The list of things I could show with a connection like this are just pure ownage, and even clients without a vag would find themselves getting wet. Metaphorically speaking of course.
You sir, are the troll for asking a question like this on Slashdot.
hrrm.
it's the system. If you're going to hook up a 2-node network for demo purposes, you'll be bottlenecked by the storage devices on the computers well before you can show what the network pipe is really capable of.
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What an easy question. Shame on you.
Get a handful of DVD's, and just copy them down the line. The demo will be short, it won't take a long time, but make sure you do multiple DVD's, and that way you can yack like a salesman for a few seconds, and finish it up with "In the time we just spent talking...." and then SHOW them what you just copied, a stack of DVD's. Then explain to them how long that would take on a standard Dialup, DSL/Cable, and T3 line. Now you have a comparisson to wow them with if they aren't that technical.
Don't forget to show off the flashy lights! "This is the machine that goes PING!"
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
so this guy wants to sell something but can't think what anyone would use it for.
Except it wouldn't be possible because its in bits not bytes. So you really can only transfer at 320MBytes/s which would take 1TBytes about 55 minutes to backup. Of course, thats assuming everything on each end can handle that kind of bandwidth.
With such a bandwith, I would consider teleportation.
Nah, a video demo won't impress them.
... sweet ...
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)
In response to the frequent argument being made here that the 'Gee Whiz' factor is redundant because if someone is going to buy the product, they will be satisfied with a practical demonstration...
Consumers, even high-end tech consumers, do not make rational decisions. Even if they are aware of this fact. Personally, if I saw a 'War and Peace' download counter ticking over furiously, I would be more enthusiastic about the purchasing the product, the same way I buy laundry detergent based on box art. Even though I'm aware of what's going on. It's just a feel good thing. Honest.
I can't believe that in all the commentary so far that someone hasn't suggested you tie it to the customer's business interests/needs ? Are we all a bunch of technical engineers that don't know anything about commercial realities ? What kind of business are your customers in, and what kind of applications are important to them ? Is it sending large JPEG images to production houses ? Is it delivering software releases ? Is it video conferencing ? For all of the technical wizardly, all I can see is a lot of commercial ineptitude!
When my company has to demonstrate the speed of our gbps switches they always use uncompressed HDTV which is about 1.5 Gbps. Leaving you with 1 Gbps to fill, you could hook up some fibre channel drives and do some remote video editing or just copy a lot of files around.
Every demo should fake at least part of what is demonstrated!
Yes.
Run a DoS against www.sco.com...go on, you know you want to.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
So you're getting 1 bit every 5 minutes, and you think that is better than sex? Sorry man.
Incidentally, if you meant 300 MB/sec, you're lying, since the PCI bus only pushes 133 MB/sec (theoretical max). And there's no way that the spindles on those SATA drives can actually push the bandwidth of the SATA 1.0 interface.
So you are -1, Overrated, -1, Troll, and -1, Stupid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Have you considered a demo that shows the customer how it will benefit them? After all they are buying it for a reason right or are you just telling them they need it to make money?
every time when there's need for large bandwidth the term is sold by offering enough bandwidth for live por^H^H^H videoconferencing
so multiple simultaneous conferences?
Yeah, that's right. Show them a stupid Powerpoint presentation that makes it clear how fast your product is compared to something else.
Except do it with real-time videoconferencing, and with the presentation originating from the other end. Use the highest-quality video and audio you can muster. And point out that you can transport realtime media with that level of quality for an entire state/country/planet, and accompany it with some snazzy CGI zoom-out and a gradually increasing cacophony of conversations. Wham, bam, please sign on the dotted line.
Post a link to your web server
1. Install a huge red switch 2. Post a link to interesting story about an explosion/pipegun/robot/Steve Balmer dancing on Slashdot. 3. Flick the switch 4. Yell 'Incoming!!!' and run!
Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
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 :)
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
some video AND several other things ---- but do this all at the same time.
Show them the --business benefits-- side of this by having lots of people moving lots of things at the same time... this visualizes ROI for the folks who have to pay by showing them their folks can get more done in less time.
How about setting up a standard DSL/cable speed machine alongside yours, and download a DVD or whatever on both. That should clearly indiciate the difference, even to a non-technical person.
Just let clients privately surf the web for a little while. They'll be amazed that their porn loads so quickly, and then they'll be sold.
I saw this in a TV commercial so it must be possible. ;-)
Should not take more than a mere infinate number of seconds.
In a few seconds. Net-install the whole shebang, all of debian-stable for instance, in a few seconds. You'll need a monster machine to handle that bandwidth, probably a dual itanium or dual opteron at the least. Maybe the Tyan Thunder K8 dual opteron board, with dual PCI-X NICs feeding into your switch.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
All obvious slashdot jokes aside, you could try to find yourself a very largely populated BitTorrent. I'm able to max out my cable connection pretty easily on some of the more popular ones.
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
I used to work on a team with a similar product. Run parallel bit error rate testers, or a product like the NXT hammers with multiple OC3's of VOip calls on them - You can set them up with a little green/red/orange LED for each phone call, or each T1 of calls, etc. Very little is more impressive than seeing 5 full height racks on the left connect to and transmit to 5 full height racks on the right, with matching leds on the right lighting up in unison as each call is made. Figure each NXT or other voice testing box had 96 leds per blade, 12 blades per chassis, 5 or 6 chassis per rack. That's a lot of LED's, and requires no math, command line reading, or other brain intensive activity (You'll be demoing to management!).
I'd get racks full of something like this for the "main test", and then run a fireberd or other bit error rate tester to show, not only do we do n OC12's of voice, transmit 100 potatoes in 0.0003 seconds, but we have no bit errors! Perfect link!
Never underestimate the power of das blinkin light.
Of course, you could just wire up something with the little duracell wrappers.
Seriously, if you don't already have some of the equipment mentioned above, please post the company, because obviously the product is sketchy and not tested. This is all basic tele/data com test equipment your group should have.
The best utility to do large bandwidth testing is probably the SmartBits from Spirent Communications. It wouldn't be easy to fill up a 2.5Gbps link with a normal server.
-- Get your free Mini Mac http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14209873
How about *gasp* finding out what your potential customers are wanting to do with such a huge link and doing your best to simulate what they will be doing?
I dunno... Just may work!
bork bork bork!
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from a rigged demo.
No, no, no. Don't tell them you're backing up their 1TB data store. Tell them your transferring Libraries of Congress. How many LOCs can you transfer in a minute?
-Adam
I agree with all the posters that say "if you dont know what application it is good for, then there is a marketing issue here".
...etc.) then there may be a need there.
When you guys built it, there was some need in the market, and not just "pure bandwidth". Who are your customer? ISPs? Telcos? Who?
having said that, something that customers often ask is how to replicate a database in real time, so if one datacenter is hit by a quake, the remote one takes over in seconds. This often involves complex database tricks (Oracle has that, we looked at it a few times, and bandwidth was the issue then, a few years ago). Even storage vendors like EMC have the ability of a SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) that replicates data in real time to another storage unit. If you have an appliction that does thousands of updates per second, and a lot of other traffic going on (e.g. off site backups, image/video traffic,
So you may setup a huge database with lots of updates on one end, and replicate that in real time on the other end, the pull the plug on one, and the other one should pick up (e.g. for a pool of web browsing clients, and a director in the middle or something).
Demonstrate the Disaster Recovery value of this.
Just an idea.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
There is a good chance that the technology that he's trying to showcase IS PCI Express and he's having the problem most people are in trying to sell it. How do you convince someone they need more bandwidth when you can't even fill the pipe to demonstrate how good it is?
that people in the market for 2.5Gbps connections have done their homework and know what they're buying.
ACs can do that now? my, how things have changed.
Just demoing a fast connection without a context to place it in will not be nearly as impressive as demoing a fast connection and contrasting it with a slow connection (i.e. DS3, T1, ISDN, or 56k modem) where both fast and slow are performing the same task.
Anyone watching the demo will see that 2.5Gbps is a bazillion times faster than their home broadband, which they can relate to, and so they will be able to comprehend its potential, even if they don't actually need that kind of speed.
Just look at how broadband is advertised with a PC downloading via broadband on one side of a desk and a PC downloading via dialup on the other side. The content that is being downloaded is insignificant, as long as it's big and hard disk IO speed is taken out of the equation...
And Don't call me Shirly, you insensitive clod!
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
Even on a file RAID5 file server with reasonable disks I don't think I could do a local copy of 1Tb in 7 minutes.
People are so used to having the net be slower than the disk they often forget that other bottlenecks can occur.
20-30, and then tell them you're using 10% of the line's capacity.
You're just trying to sell the technology anyway, do some number crunching and determine how many live full sized DVD quality video streams you could conceivable handly, use Canadian math (double it and add two, eh), and set up that many PC's with hidden internal DVD drives playing movies like The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings. Label the DVD drives with names like "UK_FS_01" or "AUSSIELINK", and away you go. They won't see any slowdown, and they'll appreciate your proper geeky choice of movies.
Yea, that's a great business model... let's spend a lotta money and time on developing great technological service and slap together a cheap-o demo for our clients.
,.,;
Whoever is in charge of marketing should get fired.
Apologies if I missed an earlier comment that got this right. The way I see it, you need a demonstration that only works at 2.5GB/s, and no slower. IMHO, streaming video is no good, because you can always buffer it, drop frames, or otherwise compensate for slower transfer rates. Backups don't work, because you can do them on a slower connection; it just takes a little longer. The remote robot suggested earlier is on the right track, but it may not be transferring enough data in both directions to require the full 2.5GB/s.
So, what application needs to transfer that much information that fast, and no slower? I don't have a definitive answer for you, but maybe someone else on SlashDot does. I suspect the answer is in real-time data collection, simulation, and/or prediction. Think tornado forcasts. Think earthquakes and tsunami's. Think real time stock market forcasts (this may not be enough data). Think real time disaster effects and emergency response, like a dirty bomb or a new volcano.
Now, when you think you have the right application picked out, test against a shorter alternative pipe; say, 100MB or 1GB or whatever you propose to replace. Will your application work --even in a degraded fashion-- on the slower pipe? If so, it's not right for you. Make the application more demanding, or choose another application.
When you have the demonstration application picked out, please post it back on SlashDot.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
..this idea, coupled with the "time warp" of another post would be a great idea, especially if you could manage to display HD video.
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.
I think the important thing here isn't the 2.5gbit link itself, but how it performs in comparison to other highspeed connections.
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.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Most suggestions thus far are very cool suggestions... from the point of a techie, but to a management user or a user who is not as technically inclined. Seeing one thing (such as downloading a DVD) and not having anything significant to compare it against is really bad.
:-)
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.
~ kjrose
You should contact some of the people doing the Internet2 project.
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.
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Or transfer a 2.5 gigabyte disk image back and forth between computers in 8 seconds...
You could transfer 3D holographic data, but I believe we calculated that you needed terabit per second bandwidth for that to work in realtime. Actually now that I think about it, 2.5gbps is pretty sluggish... come back when you've got terabit cards...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seems like many of the posters above hit the head right on the mark. And to paraphrase Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon, "Why are you building it?" If you can tell me why you are building it, then a natural demo application will flow from there...
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
If this "link" is over some sort of "hard" line, I'd suspect it is a still-born product. If pure raw speed on the machine room floor is the issue, we can (and do) buy adapters and routing hardware, now, that are *much* faster from companies like Myricom and Quadrics, for instance. If interoperability is the issue, seems to me that 10GigE is coming on -- I know we just bought a million dollars worth of switches from Foundry and are looking at cards from a couple of vendors.
That leaves, long-haul and alternative transmission mediums. For the first, you need no gee-whiz demo. Potential customers are fairly savvy there. You only need comparison data. For the latter, you might have something distinctive but you're a bit ahead of the need I think. A solution looking for a problem? Maybe you realize that and that's the purpose of the question in the first place?
Install Kazaa on 10 boxes and load them up with Porn and set them as servers.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
You make a salient point -- but you said 'Savvy customers' won't be swayed by booth girls or gee-whizzery. I agree completely, but 2 points:
1) Who says the customers are savvy?
and
2) Who the hell wants a 'savvy' customer? They are very hard to take advantage of.
Open a warez/mp3/divx server and post it on web and every major IRC channel :P
What you show depends on who you are trying to Impress.
One idea could be sharing a desktop running a high resolution CAD program with VOIP. Yes it would not take up too much band width but you could show that they could do that with a few hundred desktops.
VoIP for a few thousands.
Video.
Pumping huge amounts of data.
Mirroring database servers in realtime.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I suggest you use a huge ass powerpoint presentation -=X
I did a high-speed network protocol (Scheduled Transfer Protocol on GigE) demo a few years back, and to get something more interesting than a text console showing a transfer speed of 100MB/s (crappy 32-bit/33 MHz PCI buses and PC100 memory :( ) I did a quick&dirty video transmission thing.
:-)
What I used was just some random ~= 2Mbps video clip, but to get the bandwidth use up, I split the file into blocks of 1 MB, transmitted each block 500 times or so and the receiver chose a random copy of the block for playing the file back.
Avoids the slow disk problem yet lets you send "500 videos at the same time". It took something like 15 minutes to hack this feature into the network benchmark tool I was using
dump the human genome from one system to the other. since HD writes are slow, instead write the data to the screen, 1 pixel per GTCA .. or consider each letter as a 4-bit number and string 6 together to make a 24 bit color and put that on the screen. or something.
tell them that all they have to do is hook up a matter construction device and youve got a workable transporter
or dump teh entire gutenburg project
2.5 Gbit/s is enough to cause MS network admin's pagers to start beeping.
You could even try it with sco. You can send them to their doom within 10 minutes.
Ya know, once you mess with MS, you'll get a 1 inch law book and a 25 page letter from their legal department which you can then sell on ebay!
You'll have reams of newsprint discussing your DDoS attempt.
Its a win win situation for you(from jail);)
"My company is planning on demonstrating a 2.5 Gigabit per second link to some potential customers..." I surely hope these "customers" are not the same vacuous sort of ilk who are currently using bandwidth to try to sell me "enlarging cream", or sell me a mortgage ( for my future ex-wife to enjoy later). No, I'm not bitter.
How about an anatomy lesson over the network? When people talk about the kind of applications that high-speed networks enable, tele-medicine usually pops up. You can't demo surgery but you can demo a virtual, real-time corpse!
The Visible Human Browser
Run bittorrent and host about 1000 torrents.
You are g0d
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.
You are obviously not the type of person who would be sitting in on this type of presentation. Gee Whiz Factor (tm) is for stupid clueless managers (or anyone in charge, 99% of the time they will be stupid) who have no idea what anything means, but wow! look at that thing go! 87324 Libraries of Congress in 3 milliseconds! SOLD!
That wouldn't impress *me* either, but I actually consider myself somewhat smart and clued in. People who would be responsible for purchasing this type of thing, generally are not smart. They are corporate tools who got into their current position by kissing ass.
Joseph?
Mine!
Please...?
"I paid my money, I refuse to be inconvenienced." -Karl Cocknozzle
Download each and every frickin' iTunes track in 12 minutes.
Apple claims to have 500,000 tracks available at iTunes. Assume these are 5MiB each. Total is 250 GiB, or 2000 gigabits. Total download time @2.5 Gbps = 800 seconds, or about 12 to 13 minutes.
Anybody want a peanut?
Notice how www.sco.com isn't in DNS right now at all?? The DOS is pointing to www.sco.com, so if you REALLY want to test your network out have SCO colocate www.sco.com for a short period of time. I'm sure you'd have some good data from that.
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?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Test TCP (TTCP) is a command-line sockets-based benchmarking tool for measuring TCP and UDP performance between two systems. It was originally developed for the BSD operating system starting in 1984. The original TTCP and sources are in the public domain, and copies are available from many anonymous FTP sites.
Test TCP (TTCP) Benchmarking Tool for Measuring TCP and UDP Performance.
something just hit me!
:P
say you have computer one
at one end of the pipe and
computer two on the other end.
now attach a camera to each
computer (usb?) and position
them so that the camera captures
the monitor at one end, then send
the data from screen to second computer
which displays the stream.
now have the second computers camera capture
the screen (+ stream from first
computer) and send it back to first computer.
now have the first computer show itself plus the
second computer. have the camera at first
computer capture this and send to second computer.
repeat until pipe is saturated (if ever).
this is kinda like stepping into a lift
with mirrors and all sides. you can see yourself
a gazillion times
Set up a few dozen unpatched windows machines and load up the top 30 most network-intensive viruses.
Then, put a secured, patched machine on the network and show how there is no slow-down despite the constant flailing of the viruses.
my old employer was an early adopter of an advanced networking tech (i was under an NDA, and i think it has finally gone commercial) that daisy-chained computers together on a 800mbps bus. apparently this network was 100% efficient, with no possibility for collisions etc., etc. it could theoretically scale to hundreds of systems with no loss in throughput.
they were going to demonstrate it (after i left) as part of their renderfarm. they were going to run several test renders with lightwave on all the systems to show off its speed.
never heard how it went, but it's an idea.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
And you could try doing you're english..
It's a good idea to download a Linux distribution. I bet the techies would love that. The top brass however, the people with the money who actually make the decisions, would be left wondering what's so special about downloading a CD.
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.
GridFTP
In my experience, your audience, likely Telcos, will not be impressed with streaming video/audio, they've seen that achieved smoothly from 64K and up. Pick up a trafic generator (available in speeds that i've seen up to OC-192), MRTG, and demonstrate it's abilities. There are plenty of fast routers out there, it's the features such as MPLS, traffic shaping, and speed of recovery fom things like Fiber cuts that people that would need a 2.5Gbit link want to see.
Use a good standard measurement that everyone knows, and show how quickly you can transfer it. "1 Library of Congress, 2 Libraries of Congress, 3 Libraries of Congress..."
Sco would probably let you, just to see if the attack has died down as programmed.
> The system runs so clean that I have played
> Q3 in the foreground while all of this is
> going on.
Now, at this point I'm thinking "YES! THIS is what I'm talking about and why I buy LINUX SCSI SMP systems!"
> Oh, and this was all happening on Windows XP Pro.
NOW, I was surprised.
Simultaneously downloading and displaying all of alt.binaries.* would be pretty impressive... ...or has a full feed grown beyond 2.5G/s already?
2500Mbps*(1B/8b)=312.5MBps ;)
Sure, Ultra320 disks can't SUSTAIN it, but they could handle a burst from the network. Anyway, you know it's going to practically be more like 2Gbps, a measly 250MB/sec
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
If your sales engineers have to ask on /. for demo material, they must totally suck.
I'd short your stock and get the hell out of there, because if your SEs don't have enough imagination to come up with a demo, they'll never be able to sell anything.
If you don't have any SEs at all, then you're totally up the river and clueless...you (or your VP of sales) should get beaten with a rubber bat until they leave the industry.
Either way, no loss if it fails!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
My experience with TCP/IP under Windows indicates that it is very difficult to get more that 150 MBytes/Second from a single box (and I was using a specialized app to get that speed). I don't know what kind of delays the link imposes, but if you are using TCP/IP for the benchmark, be sure to enable scalable windows (search for RFC1323 on microsoft.com).
Another way to look at this is that PCI-Express links run at 2.5 Gbits/second. If you built something that ramped PCI-Express packets to/from your link, you could have an interesting I/O technology (comparable to Infiniband).
As others have pointed out, this sort of bandwidth is comparable/greater than most disk drive subsystems. Interesting demonstration is to use something like iSCSI to talk to disk drive that are on the other side of the link, and perhaps run some disk benchmarks, etc. Current (affordable) iSCSI controllers can push 60-80 MBytes/sec, so you could put 4 or 5 workstations on one side, and multiple iSCSI/iFiber routers on the other (with a bunch of iFiber disks).
Some other points on demos:
My 2 cents, and I've done quite a few of these over the years.
... to Brewster's Gigabits?
You can be Richard Pryor. I'll be John Candy. Hemos can be Cecil B. de Mille.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
http://www.hds.com/products_services/storage_syste ms/enterprise_storage/
p
/IO-waiter
It can handle a lot of FC ports, and it has a lot of controllers who can handle many, many disks and it has the internal bandwith to handle it
800MB/s from cache / controller
10,6GB/s internal aggregated Bw
EMC has similar rigs http://www.emc.com/products/systems/DMX_series.js
and IBM
http://www.storage.ibm.com/disk/
or you could settle fore something more humble =)
http://www.tonh.net/punchcard.html
I'd say he's got the bandwidth to do it a number of times simultaneously.
Not really, uncompressed HD video takes *alot* of bandwidth.
A single stream of 1080p uncompressed 48bpp video (what editors with alot of money to throw at hardware use) would easily saturate a 2.5Gbps network line. (which means it's a great demo, if you can actually get it to work, but you probably can't)
If he stepped that down to 24bit color, he could definitely do one, and it would still be damn impressive.
Those HD streams get the living crap compressed out of them to get them down to broadcastable bitrates.
Ok, you have to mention; are you taking in the whole oc48 which would either be:
1) Feeding off another transport shelf
2) Low speed card off a oc192
3) do you just have an oc48 and are feeding ds3's/oc3/ oc12 of the low speed shelf.
Details, more details.
Practically all video conferencing software I've seen so far has a slight delay. The software always seems to attempt to compress the stream. Uncompressed then a remote digital feed would have the responsiveness of a camcorder. First make it high resolution (at least 640x480) and then make multiple screens of it. Live high quality feedback at the speed of light over the internet would be cool to me.
Well, this guy used a computer, a VCR, an Eagles music video, a rigged power strip, telephone wire, and about half a mile of coaxial cable.
Transfer visual content !! Otherwise your demo will be boring. Go the Supercomputing conference, and you'll see boring stuff. Anyway, put a 10Ge interface or several 1Ge interfaces in a Opteron or Itanium server, and you should be able to fill your 2.5Gbps. An Itanium can fill up over 5Gbps. Luc.
It has to do with all of the old "petrified natalie portman" and pouring hot grits down the front of their pants jokes/trolls in the not too distant
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I know hardly anything about Internet-2. While I assume that it is possible to send email over Internet-2, I wonder if it is common. Is it? Is there spam? I ask mostly because I wonder how desperate these spammers are.
testing out my trending skills
Get a 10 gbit intel server nic, get two servers, each server should have 2 ultra 320 raid cards (each with 128+mb cache), four disks per controller, striped raid 0+1 (raid 0+10?) create a ram drive, and then write a script that copies a dvd (5+gbyte) from one pc's ram, across the network, to the other computers ram disk. see how many copies back and fourth you can do in a hour. then do the same test over 100mbit, and show them the dfference.
1. Transfer an entire DVD (Shouldn't take more than 30 seconds or so).
2. "This DVD I transfered contains approximately as much data as 7.5 CD-Rom's"
3. "Obviously your employees are not going to be downloading CD's or DVD constantly throughout the day, however, you have 3000 employees, and 1 CD-Rom contains as much data as 450 floppy disks. That means, in the 30 seconds in took me to transfer that DVD, 3375 floppy disks worth of information could be transferred. That means, every employee could download a floppy disk of information every 30 seconds all day long, and there would still be available bandwidth."
You could even mention how 20 MS Word documents can fit on one floppy (depending on size), and explain that not everyone will be downloading all that data at the exact same time, thus improving the transfer speeds for the other users.
4. ???
5. Profit
Put up a site with warez, MP3s and porn. Post the URL on USENET, message boards, places like that. Then just sit back and watch the number of connections and upload rates soar.
Douglas Hofstadter did this a long time ago, just not with computers but regular cameras and TVs.
He got some interesting snapshots, published in Godel-Escher-Bach, chapter XV.
I work at a TV station. We transport 2Gbps High Definition uncompressed video. That should keep your link busy.
Instructions for getting a complete mirror: mirroring HOWTO (rsync; ftp; http).
Using remote desktop from another machine with compression turned off!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
There are a bunch of 3D caves around now. These use HUGE data sets to display 3D info by surrounding you with screens and wearing stereo flicker glasses (so you can get full colour 3D)
Video conferencing is cool, but sitting in a room that makes it look like you're sitting in the same room as the person you're having a conference with is unreal.
And if that doesn't work, just make 'em play Cave-Quake on the now present cave!
Bait some SPAM to an account on the other end of your link till you're getting, say, 100000 msg/sec. Then have have your mom send you and email and show it getting delivered in under a second. That'd impress most ISPs.
Host www.trustfundgirls.com and download the 144 MB video to customers all day. This was on Howard Stern and is supposed to have good quality footage of the Paris Hilton Sex tape and is unable to load webpages because so many people are downloading the video.
.wmv and I cannot view it unless I pay some ass cobra $50 for the rights to play the file 5 times. If anyone knows how to circumvent the password or break the password on Windows Media I would appreciate it. Damn that DRM, it is screwing up my ability to look at porn.
As a side note, the file is
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
run AOL
set up a porn server at a lan-party..
chown -R us
if they are only using this as a backup link then just restore every system in that building(or use demo pc's)
Right at the grand finale, have the back wall, which was shrouded in darkness, erupt in another 100 additional screens, each displaying 9-12 streaming videos simultaneously.
Combined with 100 subwoofers and sound setups, this will knock the socks off of anyone watching.
Of course, you may want to ask for additional money to fund such an endeavor...but it would be worth it!
Two animated GIFs: one gets revealed slowly and the other gets revealed REALLY fast! I know this sells lots of broadband to dialup customers...
Join Tor today!
TeraBurst sells a product that combines high res, stereoscopic video, ethernet, audio, and keyboard/mouse, and sends that over a 2.5Mbps (OC48) fiber link.
http://www.lbl.gov/CS/Archive/headlines111601.html
its sure to raise some eyebrows.
Then setup streaming webcams in some interesting places...
A Sun V240? And I'm not even trying to think of anything halfway exotic.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
2.5Gbps (2.5x10^9 bits/sec = 298MB/sec), which is slower than U320's transfer rate of 320MB/sec. Then there's fibrechannel. And most systems that use these harddrives have RAID arrays that increase the overall transfer speed anyway. So that's how you can use 2.5Gbps with one system.
But... A 2.5Gbps typically wouldn't be used for a single machine. Behind that connection would hundreds of computers each using their share of the bandwidth. Maybe a colocation site. The colocation site I use houses about a hundred servers each at 100Mbps.
100 servers X 100Mbps = 10Gbps.
Just noticed it - at the bottom of the front page on Slashdot:
Blinding speed can compensate for a lot of deficiencies. -- David Nichols
Use a fast oscilloscope or logic analyser and a clock. ;)
If your demonstrating a new physical layer technology adding bells whistles and fancy applications to demonstrate it is wasted time.
Anyone who knows what's what can tell everything by looking at few impulse responses, it doesn't matter a bit what data layers you will build on top of your link.
answer is easy--a benchmark everyone can relate to. techs, non-techs, etc.
Porn!
Truly some of the most bitchin long-haul gear on the market... makes Cisco look sketchy. One implementation in a K-12 educational setting, we were able to decrease latency across the backbone by about 75%, enough to free up more bandwidth for video relay across a school corp of 9 buildings, 4 of which were on a main campus. used the summits between all the schools, and black diamonds as the core in each school, with the older cisco catalysts at the edge. benchmark: Norton ghost over tcp/ip.
Blame it on ElGeeko De Generico [generic geek]
If that doesn't bring the link down, nothing will!
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Point your test at http://www.thescogroup.com.
They've spent the last few weeks re-engineering the site to handle some unusually high throughput.
testing out my trending skills
If you're talking just streaming some big video files, even a single FAS960 will have no trouble saturating a 2.5Gb/sec link. For example:
filer04*> sysstat 2
CPU NFS CIFS HTTP Net kB/s Disk kB/s Tape kB/s Cache
in out read write read write age
12% 2664 0 0 557 406 44 0 0 0 34
73% 27430 0 0 2878 87207 13236 0 0 0 34
100% 37447 0 0 6597 317242 2823 0 0 0 34
100% 37265 0 0 6390 315388 3120 1741 0 0 34
100% 37453 0 0 6386 316227 2518 0 0 0 34
So over 300MB/sec even with 8K blocks, and this is a single 960. I generated that throughput with 6 boxes reading 6 seperate 2GB files. I was actually surprised to see that on a dual-Opteron 246 box I was able to read a stream from the filer at about 92MB/sec.
So I guess today's ultra-fast PCs can indeed move some serious data. Of course, if you don't have a badass NetApp filer you may need to think up some other way of delivering that kind of data rate from disk. Otherwise as someone else suggested a pile-o-RAM and a simple tcp server would do the trick.
After you wait in line at FilePlanet for an hour.
find some nice young ladies to run cyberdildonic and net camera devices simultaneously.. that much bandwidth, you should be able to have quite a stable of chicks, and properly done, make a few bucks on the company budget as well..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And bam bandwidth gone lol.
Send random data to populate any leftover bandwidth.
Try a remote backing up a system and have it complete within 10 minutes which another similar system is backing up over 100TX and tell them how how much longer this other system will take after your system has finished. QOS it.
Run a system streaming different DVD videos to 10 or so computers using QOS. Whatever would fill up a standard 100TX line. Then tell them how many independent video streams you could serve, which I'd guess would be around 300.
Also have about five free desktops with a broser on screen. This could demonstrate QOS and how they aren't appreciably affected appreciably since the internet itself is so slow. Explain how many people it would take, based on adverage cable modem usage by home users, to saturate your line (not your uplink).
A digitized libary of congress is about 10 terabytes. Tell them how long it would take to transfer it between computers at your speed rates. It obviously won't impress them. If my math is right around 3 hours. Then tell them how long it would take to download at other speeds. 100TX would be around three and a half days.
Roughtly what broadband is to modem, your line is to 100TX.
Who cares how fast it is... can it survive a Slashdotting?
+++OK ATH
ROFL tarunji aap ke insight ka bahut mazaa aaya!
"fucking cowards couldn't stop box-cutters"... ROFLMAO. If only the pakis used boxcutters in kargil, we wouldn't have spilled the blood of so many veer jawans, na?
BTW, aap in chutiyon ke mooh kyon lag rahe ho? Pehle se hi itne gusse se pagal ho baithe hain. Aur bhadkaoge to jaane aur kya-kya kahenge.
I mean, yeah, they are racist and I know it doesn't really make a diffrence, but still... though I think the fucking-cow-was-ur-mother thing was funny has hell.
Also, aap ho kahan se? India mein kahan se I mean. Aur aap yahan 9/11 ke pehle ya baadme aaye? Cos that was about when the economy started to slip.
I symphathize with the people who lost their jobs though, because my dad's whole company moved to bangalore, my uncle's outsourcing ppl stole his chip design plans before it could be copyrighted and my girlfriends dad has been out of work for like 2 years now. I've felt the pain first hand. But as SRK says, senorita, bade bade deshon mein aisi chhoti chhoti baatein hoti rehti hai. I'm in CS engineering college right now, and my mom always jokes that I'll have to complete the circle and move back to India to find a job.
Thank god, shaayad pehli baar mujhe haath mein indian passport hone ka garw hai. $50,000 nahin to $11,000 sahi.
Oh btw to all u ppl reading this, the conversion factor between indian and american prices is about 5:1, so having a salary of $11,000 in india is like having a salary of $55,000 here, not $700,000. How the hell did you come up with such ridiculous statistics anyway? Also, the average Indian person lives on about $650 a year - or, about $2900 if it were in American prices. And yes, they live on exactly what 2900 dollars would buy you in america - which is to say, next to nothing. Now you know why $11,000 is such a fortune in India. If you buy only non luxury goods, then the 11,000 seems like 55,000 would in america. Much better to earn 55,000 than earn 2900 you'll agree. And that's the reason why the indians are "stealing" your jobs.
That gulf of rich and poor you talk about between your CEOs and yourselves also exists between yourselves and the indians. If someone offered you 20 times your salary to take your CEO's place would you not do it? Ofcourse you would. Then why blame others for doing the same?
And ok, I can understand youre worried about your jobs. My family went through EXACTLY this only about a year ago. My dad was laid off, was unemployed for 6 months, and now works for half his former pay at an oil refinery and has to commute 75 miles each way at 4 am every fucking day to get to it. On top of that, they have him on call, so he often needs to leave in the middle of the night if there is an emergency. Sometimes he works 16 hour days, comes home, sleeps for 6 hours and then back to work it is. So please, spare me the fucking racist bullshit that this topic has been all about. We are Indians, and we too have been hurt as much as others by the downturn in the Economy.
And just because India is full of short people, fat people, brown people, poor people or illiterate people with elephant gods does not give you the right to talk shit about it. Your culture and your religion are equally stupid and fucked up to them, and your inability to speak their language is just as bad as them not speaking yours. I mean, atleast they are TRYING. All I see you do is whine, whine, whine.
You say that Indians are dumb, unimaginitive and cannot be entreprenerial. And yet you ask who the hell is going to give you capital to form new businesses when you are barely getting by on minimum wage right now. You think its so hard to support a family on $11,000 per year? Try doing it on $2900 instead, and then we'll see whether you have any time, energy or venture capitalists to lend you money to start a business.
So please, stick to the topic and talk about outsourcing. If you think thats stealing your job, ok, say so. But please don't blame it on all this irrelevant racist bullshit that seems to be the main content of this thread. Its false, its demeaning, and it contributes nothing to the discussion.
Live long and prosper.
First of all, PCI Express is an implementation of parts of the 3GIO specifications(For example, PCI Express only allows for implementation on a PCB, i.e backplane, while the full 3GIO supports linking systems via fiber-optic cable).
As for your comments about PCI-X, not all implementations of PCI-X supports that, and you're still dependent upon transfers between various units, and RAM etc. DMA channels don't matter much when you've still only got that one physical conncetion and it's half-duplex. And using UDP is a hit-or-miss proposition. Any packet loss on the way, and the demo won't look quite as good
I used to work for Tektronix. You could have a sales engineer measure your performance while you demo your equipment. Sounds like it would be good for both of you. ay
A friend at McGill university is writing code that has been used to demonstrate 2-way video conferencing with uncompressed video and 12 channels of uncompressed high-quality audio. With this software, they've managed to have musicians in Ottawa and Montreal collaborate in live jam sessions. The demo's have been quite impresive, and you can get the code here. (Not yet open source, although they're working towards that.)
Hey Man, I was in USA before 9/11, and also after, and I saw the change in attitude in Americans. It was pretty dramatic...and even after their two tallest buildings get knocked down by a bunch of jihadi scum, they still haven't figured out why the rest of world hates America so much....U think they would finally wake up to the fact that they fucking preach democracy and freedom and blah blah blah and practise the absolute opposite. They praise China, a communist country who mows down its citizens when they ask for freedom. They kiss Pakistan's ass, when it's clear that all the WMDs and Al-Qaeda connections which were meant to be in Iraq are actually in Pakistan.....It would still be ok, if this was just government policy, and the regular joe would disassociate themselves from this...but no...the avergae American is raised on a diet of sensationalist shit media, and thus believe every word of what their newspapers and media say just like in the USSR. CNN is just a frikkin' propaganda channel....forget freedom of speech. Before 9/11, at least the software industry used to be colour-blind and a shining example of the fact the world can be a better place where everyone can live together, with tolerance and propserity for all....but now the American Software community (at least based on the Slashdot posts, I can't speak for the rest) seems to have given into the same xenophobic mis-informed shit that their media and their government spreads. You know, outside America, EVERYBODY KNEW there were no WMDs in Iraq, and no links to Al Qaeda. It was fucking obvious. THIS is why we were all reluctant to go to war. There are worse terrors in the world than some dumbass dictator who abuses his own people....Pakistan and Afghanistan are the MAIN DANGERS to the world, Osama's outsourcing of terrorism to these two countries is a little more threatening than Indian software outsourcing, take my word. Afghanistan you guys took care of, good on you. Now fucking finish the job off. Bush, may the bastard get butt-fucked by the Taliban, said "Either you're with us, or against us". Is Pakistan for or against u? Does a country that sells nuclear secrets to all of the members of your Axis of Evil qualify as an Ally? Has the definition of ally changed? I'm sorry I can't find a grey area here...but then what do I know, I'm just someone from the land of towel-heads...although I've never put a towel on my head except to dry my hair....
To the poster I've replied to, thanks for showing some solidarity, we Indians are in need of that these days. Fucking Americans will never understand that we could be good friends to them, and it would benefit both our countries... their loss. Instead they choose to ebe jealous and racist about it. A real shame to see the "Greatest Nation on Earth" stopp down to the level of those same prejudicial countries whom they mock.