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Pipeline: Do you feel that this makes Avaya’s role special, in helping to bring the games to the world?
Porter: What we do is all about connecting people, regardless of underlying infrastructure. Building out this network, we learned a lot of lessons. What we’ve learned, we get to take back into the field with us.
Pipeline: What did Avaya do to ensure a positive QoS over the network?
Porter: It involves planning and testing. We literally built this network in a basement before the event. There were 4000 unique tests in the fall of last year. When we went into full scale production, guys literally unbolted the racks and shipped out the complete system. That has really paid off. It has worked remarkably well.
Pipeline: What approach was taken with regards to fault management?
Porter: Unlike enterprise networks, we have spent a disproportionate amount of time watching this network in real time. We’re had a lot of eyeballs on it, 24 hours a day. We use intrusion detection systems, and CNA and OpenView. We also use a few other tools that I won’t mention until after the games.
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"Thomas Porter, Ph.D. joined the Avaya Global Managed Services in 2002 as a Senior Security Consultant." |
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Pipeline: When are you officially done with the event?
Porter: In about 13 days. An interesting fact that reflects the up and down nature of the network is that the entire network was only built out for a single day. We’re now in the gradual deinstall phase.
Pipeline: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this event?
Porter: Well, we hope they watch. I think that the overall message is that converged networks work. I’d heard this term bandied about and I was never quite sure what it would look like in action, even though I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I think we’re starting to see data, video, pictures, voice, and other information all going across one infrastructure, and it works. It’s not the future anymore. It’s actually here.
Pipeline: Excellent. Thank you for your time, and enjoy the rest of the games.
Porter: Thank you.
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Pipeline: Were there some things that took you by surprise?
Porter: Well I was sorry to see the US go so quickly [laughs]
Pipeline: [laugh] Well, yes.
Porter: Also, there were so many media types taking photos, and whereas in previous events, photographers had used old-fashioned means to transmit their photographs to their respective centers. One of the things that made life interesting this year was that we carried most of the photographs across our networks. It’s amazing how much bandwidth gets eaten up by photos. There’s another that I’d rather not say, but I’ll knock on wood and say it anyway. It’s gone much more smoothly than we had anticipated. We’ve been attacked with some regularity, but the attacks have not been particularly novel. We used to say during the Confederations Cup, “Langeweile ist gut”, which means, in German, “Boredom is good”. We’ve used simulated attacks from the inside to test our readiness. We’re cautiously delighted that we haven’t had more problems.
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About Thomas Porter:
Thomas Porter, Ph.D. joined the Avaya Global Managed Services in 2002 as a Senior Security Consultant. Prior to joining AGMS, Porter worked at Alteon WebSystems and Nortel Networks. Recently, Porter served as the first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Avaya. He has spent over ten (10) years in the networking and security industry as a consultant, speaker and developer of security tools.
Tom lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, Kinga – an Asst. Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of North Carolina - and two Chesapeake Bay Retrievers.
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