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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?"
if you've got the bandwidth end-to-end, go for it
Can't beat powerpoint, especially with the online components to integrate voice/video/slideshows/images etc
... but do you're math in bits not bytes... that'd be like 53 minutes in bit time (oops).
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 an article by Intel. It's their advertisements for IXP, but nevertheless a good read with nice statistics.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
here:
http://proj.sunet.se/E2E/
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
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.
DVD is 8mbps, this link is 2.5Gbps. A dozen DVD's won't even make a dent in the capacity of this line, you'll need 2 to 3 hundred DVD's playing at once...
If you can show this (videowall) it would be very impressive!
--Blerik
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).
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Then the answer is probably to include upgrading in the demo.
"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).
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.
Surely that is more a low latency demo than a high bandwidth one?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
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.
Telemicroscopy and 3D visualization apps are the eye-popping demos - they chew up bandwidth like anything, and it's all cool high-tech science stuff. Try looking at the Internet2 Consortium's website, and seeing the kind of stuff they do.
I did some DARPA-funded work developing a client/server 3D brain atlas viewer, linked to a genomics database. Mac-based. Really neat to be able to fly through a mouse's brain in real time with better than 20 micron resolution (that's about 3-4 cells/voxel).
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
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.]
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.
Interesting but don't forget about latency...
Overall bandwidth may be the same, but that is really a secondary concern with hard drives in most cases.
The point he was making was that there are different ways of stating amounts of binary data, and that sometimes it is difficult to remember how exactly they relate to one another.
The inconsistency was deliberate and appropriate.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
Oh yeah, because clearly if you sell a line that you know what to do with for 5,000 people, then you'd better damned well know how to spend it at one box.
Y'know, instead of wasting it, there is *one* possible solution. I'm no marketer, so I don't know if this is feasable, and I also don't know if you can put the kind of computational horsepower at that point that would make this realistic.
I'm assuming that if they need that kind of line, they have a bunch of machines behind it, maybe a lot of which are available at the moment. Universities, corporations deploying a new building, and virtual desktop office spaces which don't get used during certain hours might provide a reasonable arena for this, and for all I know, your test rig might, too.
Let's say your install is scheduled to be done Monday, and the demo is on Wednesday. After your Monday tests are over, point all of your spare cycles at Seti@Home. Create a new team called "MondayWednesdayCorporateSanta" and get it a significant rank by the time the suits come in. If you turn to them on wednesday, show them you pulling down 200 DVDs at once, then show them an estimate of how many 56k modems and how many cable modems they're looking at, that's a start, great. The next thing to do is to house maybe two dozen DVDs on such a line at the home office, and let the suits download an entire movie in seconds (do that to a laptop, and immediately remove the laptop from the network; next, make a big deal about how the laptop wasn't about to access even one thirtieth of a percent of the total pipeline, and how if there were three hundred workers in here doing that at once it wouldn't slow down.
Ah, but then the killer. "In fact, gentlemen, this line is so large that I couldn't think of anything one computer could do to come anywhere near taxing it, and that makes presenting it somewhat difficult. I took the liberty of running the SETI@Home client, a very popular distributed computing client which has now been receiving donated cycles from networks, clusters, vector computers and supercomputers for six years. They rank their participants, some of whom have been donating supercomputer time since day one. We've been at it since (check watch) Monday night, about 52 hours ago. Out of 8,000 participants, we're already ranked #23. This, my friends, is too large of a line to describe."
Honestly, I'd rather see it go towards the protien folding effort rather than seti@home. However, if one of the suits gets impressed upon them the computational resources they could be bending towards the public and smells the PR (I mean, all they'd be spending was electric, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than a PBS spot,) they might be convinced to donate a corporate superteam. Get a couple of corporations in competition, and Wham! Massive data crunching power out of nowhere, make the suits PR happy. Good karma.
So, yeah, treat it as that last gem to stack on top of your demo presentations. Note the plural - just one won't be impressive. But in the effort to build things to wow the Management, do some good.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
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 like the strategy...
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.
Internet-2 is a research network, not a commercial network. It is not mainly used for email, although it could be. Since it is not a commercial network, most malicious use (like SPAM) is kept to a minimum. You can read about it at the Internet-2 website.