Stephen Withers
Friday, 03 September 2010 14:31
Business IT -
Networking
Page 1 of 2
Sydney might have hosted the 'best ever' Olympic Games back in 2000, but Microsoft Tech.Ed 2010 held last week on the Gold Coast was the best ever as far as the event's technology manager Jorke Odolphi is concerned.
Odolphi, who spends most of the year as web platform architect evangelist with Microsoft Australia, told iTWire that the conference was "our best Tech.Ed ever" from an infrastructure perspective. There was zero downtime, and the "wireless [network] was rock solid." Furthermore, feedback from attendees was "overwhelmingly positive."
With around 3000 people at the event, wireless use peaked at around 1300 devices simultaneously connected. "[The network] could have handled three times as many devices," said Odolphi.
A significant change introduced for this year's event was the use of the IPv6 protocol. "We saw a fairly good uptake," Odolphi said, but there was only 23GB of IPv6 traffic compared with 1553GB of IPv4 traffic.
"There's not much content out there to consume [from IPv6 servers]," he explained. For example, while Facebook's main servers are accessible via IPv6, the associated content delivery network is still IPv4 only. So if someone turns off IPv4 and uses Facebook "it looks like a train wreck" according to an anonymous Microsoft engineer.
Active Directory broadcasts plus Google and YouTube access accounted for most of the IPv6 traffic on the Tech.Ed network generated by attendees. Still, "it was a good experiment," said Odolphi.
But there were some network-related issues - please
read on.
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