More key technologies cited by Horne include Coyote Point’s load balancing and application acceleration devices; and Riverbed’s Cascade technology for network and application analysis and reporting.

Horne says his team is running 60 to 80 virtual machines, 30 of them in production, and replicating e-mail, help desk, network monitoring tools and other virtual workloads to Global Data Vault. In addition to having a live backup during the show, Horne says that hosting InteropNet virtual machines in the cloud will allow the network’s technicians to perform further testing and analysis after the conference ends.

“It gives us the ability to keep running diagnostics on the network after the show, the ability to do a better post-mortem,” he says.

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