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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?"
Post a link to it on slashdot and see how long it lasts.
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.
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!
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..
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...
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?
... but do you're math in bits not bytes... that'd be like 53 minutes in bit time (oops).
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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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?
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
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 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.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
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
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???
here:
http://proj.sunet.se/E2E/
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
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.
"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.
I started running RAID SATA and it's better than sex. Seriously, 300 mb/s throughput?
Seriously, have you ever had sex? I've configured dual-tray 18 spindle raid0+1 on fibre channel and all it was to me was disk storage. But then again, I've had sex with many women.
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.
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
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.
it's easy yes, but by god you're right to say it :)
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
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.
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.
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!
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)
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!
How about they setup a web server with some pretty looking 3D realtime http stat program that can stream its output as video.
Then post the site's address on Slashdot.
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.
..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.
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.