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?"

Comments

Re:1 terabyte backup to remote site in 7 mins..

[m0ntar3]

... but do you're math in bits not bytes... that'd be like 53 minutes in bit time (oops).

Re:Use PCI-X

[robbyjo]

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.

Check how SUNET did it

[thorgil]

here:
http://proj.sunet.se/E2E/

Re:Relate in DVDs

[ysachlandil]

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

Re:If even you don't know what it's good for

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Cost Savings.

[jellomizer]

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.