If managing 2,500 attendees was not an easy task, managing the entire IT infrastructure required to run the demo room, tech labs, developers room—across the huge Swan and Dolphin property—that would gel with the ‘pervasive access’ theme of the event was tougher. But Citrix Systems’ six-member technical marketing department team managed to pull this act smoothly in 4 days, without a single glitch. Talking to Dataquest, Ray Mohammed, manager of the company’s technical marketing department and the man who handles IT infrastructure for the company at all such events across the globe, reveled that more than manpower it took six months’ intricate planning for him to pull off this 4-day wonder.

l IT infrastructure used at the iForum …
We had four NFuse Elite servers, four agent servers, one blade server and one database server—SQL 2000—running on Windows 2000 Advanced Servers. The system also used four agent servers that ran in parallel on different machines to solve cooperatively a placement-routing problem. They were implemented as a distributed system using a client/server model. A distributed computer system contained software programs and data resources dispersed across independent computers connected through a communication network.

l Major challenges faced …
One of the biggest challenges was the planning for the whole project. It has been such a huge conference with the attendees increasing almost every year; the entire project was broken into sub-projects. This time we divided the project on the basis of the rooms that we had—demo room, tech lab, developers’ room, media room and test room. The entire media room was a project in itself, as the press required their own portal, their own applications for activities such as downloading and sharing of data, sending pictures and posting latest stories.

l Connectivity and wireless protocol used …
We demonstrated wireless technologies on the exhibit floor. Since we were exhibiting technologies of future, using wireless protocol for this floor was just the right way of doing this. It had an entire wireless pavilion set up. There we showcased a combination of WLAN, CDMA, and GPRS technologies.

l Bandwidth used …
We had 3 T1 lines. One of the reasons we got three dedicated lines was the keynote address. The session was web-enabled; we also used videoconferencing and a lot of other heavy creative media for graphics, which require heavy bandwidth. Also, between the remaining of the conference area, we split the 2 T1 lines. We also had fiber optic cables laid in the two hotels.

l Citrix technologies used …
The entire conference was managed on server-based computing model. We used our load balancing technologies, primarily because we had 10 MetaFrame servers within the farms. We were also prepared for an instance where if one of the servers goes down the others would reconnect automatically to the servers in the farm. This was one of our Rack servers.