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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?"
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.
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.
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
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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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
i believe the people that had the huge fiber link in europe downloaded the entire debian distribution at the time for their little benchmark. perhaps you could do some simular huge thing your customers are familar with.
i forgot how long the download was and what they used but it was insanely fast and they used specialized software.
i am sure 100 bonnie's on your link would look nice however.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
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.
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?
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
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually that's not a bad idea (though probably not the paris video). One of the most impressive display's I've seen was the video of the macworld 1999 where they netbooted 50 imac's that then each streamed a different fullscreen video. I couldn't find a link to the video on google, does anyone have that?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
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.
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.
I used to work for a company that did high speed networking for film and television. When we did demo's we used the link for what they'd be using the link for (in this case video conferencing and transferring of very large digital video files).
The "big-wigs" we would demo for knew that it took a long time even over the regular 100mbit network to transfer a 1GB file, let alone transfer it across a continent via the internet, so, that's what we would do. And would do it while streaming a DVD from one coast to the other. It showed them exactly how much more better our service would work for them when compared directly to what they were using now.
As for hardware, we found that the little SGI O2 boxes were absolutely amazing to handle high bandwidth transfers. Regular Intel boxes with W2K were acceptable, but couldn't match the performance of the O2's.
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"