One Wall of Fire Demo is Worth 1K Words

Bill Anderson did his “Wall of Fire” demo this morning during Steveb’s keynote, live, without backup or backstage elves - His words “10 feet from termination”.

Picture 100 Monitors in an array about 20x5 hooked to 100 W2K/XP PCs. The “user state” on these machines is a custom bitmap that together displays a Winlogo across the array. In 9 mins, using SMS, he backs up the user state (the bitmap) and deploys a new OS , (SP2). He kicked off all the re-images at once because Osdeploy.exe was executing, waiting for a custom action. Press a button, put your career at risk. Guess no one blinked because this is Vegas, but it was a pretty gutsy demo IMHO.

Worked like a charm, about 9 mins into Steve’s speech we see the loverly Security Center window pop up on every screen, and everyone in the room could see the Winlogo (representing user state) behind them. Bravo.

The link to watch it should be live later today. JMike's blog has pics.