2013 Las Vegas Interop Network Usage

Interop Las Vegas is over for another year, and as we recover from the excess that comes with every event that happens in Vegas, we’ve had a chance to look at the data captured from the pair of EndaceProbe appliances I deployed on InteropNet. And they tell a fascinating story about what people do when they’re not listening to vendor pitches! For anyone not familiar with InteropNet, it’s the network that provides the 18,000 show visitors and 285 vendors that exhibit with connectivity. Given the nature of the show, it’s become a showcase in its own right for the very latest networking, security and monitoring products. We’re proud to have been invited to deploy our EndaceProbe appliances in the network analysis and forensics product category. The EndaceProbe appliances, with 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) interfaces and 64TB of local storage, were deployed so that they could see, capture and record every packet on the network. Between Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. and noon on Thursday, the EndaceProbe appliances recorded an incredible 72 billion packets. The dropped packet counter on the EndaceProbe recorded zero packet loss, so when I say that 72 billion packets traversed the network, I really mean 72 billion packets traversed the network and captured every single one to disk. Those 72 billion packets translate to: 68GB of metadata that can be used to generate EndaceVision visualizations. 6.1TB of packet data that can be retrieved through EndaceVision in a few short clicks for a full payload investigation in packets, or Wireshark. Users of the network consumed more than 130GB of iTunes traffic (7th highest on the list of application usage) and 100 GB of bit torrent (10th highest on the list). Whether vendors should be taking this as an insight into how interesting their presentations are is an interesting question in its own right! On the network itself, the average bandwidth utilization was just 350 Mbps, however, what’s interesting – and what few organizations understand given the lack of fidelity in their monitoring tools – is that the network was regularly bursting to 8Gbps and had frequent spikes of 10Gbps (measured in the millisecond range). The ability to see traffic spikes at such a low level of resolution is critical for understanding the behavior of the network and planning for the future. With the wrong tools, you could easily be mistaken to thinking that a 1Gbps link would be sufficient to handle InteropNet traffic. But you’d be very wrong indeed…. An interesting anecdote from the NOC that highlights the power of EndaceVision came from an escalation inside the NOC that the show wifi was slow. In a few clicks, we were able to show that the problem was coming from a single user (Silvio, we know who you are!) who decided to download more than 300GB of data over the network and saturate the resource. So, until next year, we bid Las Vegas farewell and head home for a well deserved rest.