By Ben van Kerkwyk
ProCurve Networking by HP
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SEATTLE – Last night’s closing ceremonies for the World Cyber Games marked the end of the 2007 Grand Finals for competitors. But we still have work to do.
Actually, for us the two most intensive activities are setting it up and tearing it down. It doesn’t take long. We just have to grab everything, box it up and prep it for shipping. That’s the hardest part. We’ve got more than 40 boxes that need to be packed up and loaded on a couple of pallets to be shipped out of here. |
Among those are two new products – the ProCurve Switch 8212zl and a Wireless Edge Services Module zl – we brought to try out at the WCG.
I’ve been really impressed with the 8212zl core switch. This is my first chance to use one. It was easy to use for me, because I’m familiar with the ProCurve Switch 5400. It’s the same code and interface, so it was an easy learning curve. Its performance has been flawless. Despite all the demands, we haven’t been taxing it whatsoever. Frankly, its CPU is easily handling the load here.
We’re doing all of our ACLs and security measures on it, and we haven’t had any issues. I also think it looks good in the rack. We’ve got it fully set up with two management modules, a couple of power supplies and fabric cards. So we’re ready if there is a failure of any kind – which we haven’t had. But we also brought a second 8212zl just in case. Right now it’s just sitting in the rack looking pretty with all the lights on.
That may sound glib, but in an event like this you have to make sure you can cover all the bases in an emergency.
The wireless side of the WCG hasn’t been too challenging, in part because we’ve been able to do this in a centralized manner with the new wireless module zl. Instead of configuring every radio port, we only had to set up one policy. Chris did all the work. Basically he set up the policy on the centralized engine, and then it was a case of deploying as many radio ports as we wanted. It scales so easily. Instead of setting up 10 different access points and configuring it 10 different times – doing the same thing each time – you just do it once and don’t worry if you have to make a change (we’ve had to do that). With the WESM, you do it once, deploy the radio ports, and if you need more you just put them out there. It’s very scalable and quite easy. Chris has been managing the wireless side very well.
We’re supplying different levels of connectivity for different users. The press has its own access, which is restricted and going to the Internet. But then we have the headquarters folks, who pretty much have unrestricted access to everything. Those are the two biggest groups of users.
The WCG folks didn’t want us providing public wireless, but we were still able to use a number of features on the WESM. Those include web authentication and put up multiple SSIDs – different wireless networks over the same infrastructure. We could deploy more if we wanted to. In fact, if we wanted to turn on public wireless access it would be a two-minute thing.
The biggest wireless challenge was more of a planning issue. Most of the switches we brought were non-PoE. That’s been a little difficult with some of the radio ports. We strategically placed our PoE switches around the facility just so we could power the radio ports. But those were more than enough to cover it.
It’s predominately a wired environment. There aren’t a lot of RF challenges here. There was one room that was a last-minute challenge. Samsung had a booth where some of the press and VIPs were hanging out in. It was a concrete box you couldn’t get a signal into, so we had to run a line into it. That was more of a challenge for the cabling guys than for us.
Now we get to pack it all up, assess what we’ve done and get ready for next year. If you have any ideas from these posts as how we can do things better, please email me: ben.van_kerkwyk@hp.com
See you next year! |
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