At Interop, networking is a religious calling

LAS VEGAS -- In less than a month, Robert Ballecer will be ordained as a Jesuit priest, but this week he will use his skills as an engineer to lead the monitoring and management of one of the world’s largest temporary networks.

Ballecer’s presence behind the scenes of the InteropNet, the network that powers the Interop conference, may seem a curious one in a world where scientific knowledge and religious belief are often considered at odds. In fact, Ballecer says his first application to volunteer for the InteropNet was turned down, because organizers were afraid of scandalizing the future priest.

But technology and religion go hand-in-hand for the 32-year-old Ballecer, who has spent much of his life traveling around the world to build telecommunications networks for the Catholic Church.

“People ask me all the time, ‘How can you be an engineer and a priest at the same time?’” Ballecer said Monday in the Network Operations Center (NOC) that runs Interop. “I say, ‘Well, yeah, my religious order has a very long history of doing that -- scientists, engineers, philosophers, theologians, astronomers.’”

Pushing the Catholic Church into the age of technology is still challenging despite that history, he says. Ballecer works at the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., and runs its Center for Apostolic Technology.

“What the Center for Apostolic technology tries to do is help our brothers and sisters . . . embrace [technology] rather than run from it screaming and saying it’s the devil and blasphemy, etc. Which we have a very proud history of doing as well,” Ballecer says.

After 14 years of training, Ballecer is scheduled to be ordained in Los Angeles on June 9.

But there are more immediate concerns for him and the other 15 volunteer engineers at Interop, as well as the 60 engineers sent by 27 vendors that are loaning equipment.

The InteropNet, which serves 475 exhibitors and nearly 20,000 attendees, has to provide a stable platform for vendors to demonstrate their technologies, and Internet connectivity for attendees, says lead network engineer Glenn Evans, one of three full-time CMP Events employees who oversee the network for the Vegas and New York Interop shows. Evans started volunteering for Interop in the mid-1990s in Australia, which hosted an Interop show until 2002, he says.

In Vegas this week, with 10 terabytes of storage, 4.5 miles of fiber-optic cable, 600 amps of current a day and various other pieces of equipment, Evans and his team provide a wired network for exhibitors and wireless Internet access to attendees. There are about 800 Ethernet ports and 64 access points on the show floor and another 500 ports and 160 access points in the conference areas, he says.

Evans described the network Monday from inside the NOC, a walled-in space in the corner of the show floor containing work stations for engineers, and the main rack which serves as the equipment center for the whole show. The rack contains equipment from every vendor involved in the InteropNet, such as Extreme switches, Juniper firewalls and an Avaya phone system.

The total value of all the equipment donated by vendors is nearly $10 million. The cost to Interop organizers of setting up the equipment, including transportation, was between $150,000 and $175,000, he said.

Getting equipment from different vendors to work together is sometimes challenging, says Brian Chee, a volunteer engineer who works in the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, and is also a contributing editor for InfoWorld.

“Sometimes one vendor may call a particular type of configuration one thing, and another vendor will call it something a little different,” Chee says. “They’re still saying the same thing, but their engineers might be convinced, ‘No, you did it wrong.’”

It’s not surprising, though, considering these vendors are competitors when they’re not cooperating at Interop, Evans says. “Out in the business world, they’re competitors,” he says. “It’s an unusual thing in this industry where competitors come together to actually provide services to everybody else.”

The vendors and network engineers come together a few weeks before Interop at the HotStage event in Belmont, Calif., where the network is built in a large warehouse for a test run. It’s then taken apart, shipped to Vegas and built again for the show.

“The analogy I use is that it’s like completely networking, soup to nuts, the World Trade Center, in three days,” Chee says.

Taking the network apart may be the most hectic time of all. The conference runs from Sunday through Friday this week, with the exposition open from Tuesday to Thursday.

The exposition booths can cost more than $1 million, so vendors don’t want to waste any time getting those booths to the next show after Interop closes, says Chee, who is responsible for working with the voice and video vendors that provide gear and engineering for the InteropNet.

“We will prestage personnel around the show floor minutes before the show closes,” he says. “As soon as the announcement comes over the loudspeaker we have one hour to pull the network connections, wrap up the fiber, protect the fiber and roll all the equipment racks off the show floor. One hour. And the reason why is we’ve got to get it off the show floor before the freight starts coming in and we start having to dodge forklifts.”

Interop Las Vegas isn’t nearly as large as it was when Chee began volunteering in 1995, when he says there were about 200,000 attendees. But the nearly 20,000 attendees this year represent an increase of more than 10% since last year, and the number of exhibitors has risen 100 over last year’s total.

For the volunteers, who help coordinate planning several months before the show and typically arrive a week before it begins, the challenges have begun already. The network has already survived an attack by a botnet launched by hackers who have taken over the computers of home users, Ballecer says.

“They know there’s a lot of computers here that if they take over they get a lot of power in a temporary space that they can do damage with,” he says.