61–68 of 68 posts
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Why shouldn't an ISP charge Netflix to host a box in their datacenter? I'd charge you a fee if you wanted to store your DVDs in my house, even if you let me watch them.
Because the box saves the ISP more money than its hosting costs.
Can anyone explain why an ISP would push back Netflix installing one of these boxes? Does the ISP want Netflix service congestion to better sell its own media assets/distribution (i.e. cable TV)?
This is what game theorists call a 'pure bargaining' [1] problem:- reaching a deal makes $900, but we have to decide how to split that between us. Both of us want as big a share as possible, but our main leverage is refusing to reach a deal.
In this situation, I am the ISP; installing a Netflix box costs me $100 for power, bandwidth, whatever. Netflix are the ones that make $1000, as installing the box lets them get more customers. ISPs refuse to install boxes because they want more money than Netflix is offering, and refusing to install is the only way to get it.
From my understanding, these boxes are basically local copies of the entire Netflix online catalog - a catalog that frequently changes. How do these ~15,000 machines pick up new content? I assume they synchronize with the Netflix mothership every once in a while. My question (without any intent to trivialize what Netflix is doing) is, isn't that just a good-old caching system? But it makes me wonder if it would be po…
It _would_ be a perfect setup (much much better than sending the same stream through the same lines just because 2 persons are watching the same show)
The problem here is not technical (Bittorrent solves that) the problem is societal: for most of the content that is of interest to population, you are not allowed to redistribute it. So Netflix has to DRM-protect the content for everyone, meaning that the actual content that transits on the line has to be different, meaning that you can't redistribute it (since it's targeted to you, no one else could decode it).
If you want to see how much the technical side works, take a look at PopcornTime.
Could someone explain to me (it's been a long day, and I'm no storage expert!) how these are useful, wouldn't you need a whole bunch of these at each location they are to be installed? Just basing this on my own experience I have 12 drives in RAID which have a fairly substantial sequential throughput. Start multiple streams of high bandwidth videos and the maximum throughput from the drives drops sharply due to the r…
These things can pump out 12Gbit during peak viewing, which is enough for about 4,000 avg. 3 Mbit streams. If they can cram in 256GB of DRAM, that's enough room for a 64MB buffer per stream, or about 170 seconds worth of streaming. Now you only need to be able to fill those buffers at a rate of about 24/second. I'm assuming whatever file system is on the disks uses a massive block size, so the number of seeks you'd h…
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What? While I can't argue with them being ridiculously expensive (because they very much are) why would them being power hungry, hot, and extremely sensitive to vibration even matter if they are going to be rack-mounted into an ISP's data center, with redundant power-supplies and a data-center grade cooling system to match? The only possible issue of the ones you raised is low data density, but all engineering is a t…
I will double-down to claim that 15krpm SAS drives are a bad choice for any application, and they are only used as a bandaid for marginal improvements on irredeemable system designs. To address your points individually: 1) Power hungry. When you add in conversion and distribution and cooling, every watt consumed by the computer is consumed again by the datacenter infrastructure. Power costs money. 2) Hot is just the…
1) Power Hungry, the total power envelope of a rack position is the limiting issue. You can fit 16-20 disks per RU no problem. The constraint on total density is your 5kVa or 10kVa power budget. Watts matter.
3) sensitive to vibration, be very very quiet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
4) Density, actually 4TB is hitting the sweet spot for $ per byte last time I looked. If you need absolute density look for 5 & 6TB Real Soon Now. If you can tolerate some loss variable density disks around 5TB look quite a bit more cost effective.
5) Read ahead, you only need to read ahead by a couple of chunks. For video ball park it at 2MB. You don't really need lots of RAM, think 32-64GB per chassis. Additionally each 8GB dimm costs about the same power as a disk. By going with 32GB instead of 64 I can fit another 2-3 disks in the power budget per chassis.
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From the operator of a smaller ISP: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2014/07/search/bmV...
That's Brett Glass, though, who is … opinionated. It's a good idea to read the entire thread for responses from a number of other network operators as well as some Netflix technical staff: http://seclists.org/nanog/2014/Jul/index.html#265
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I'm no expert either, but if my napkin math is right, fully utilized in a best-case scenario (no network overhead, etc.), those disks would peak at around 30-40 MByte/s (36 disks, 10 Gbit NIC). I'm not sure if the I/O is really all that random. Theoretically, it's all sequential, but might effectively hit the disk like random I/O because of concurrent streaming sessions, varying network speed and so on. My guess is y…
The new versions are all SSD.
From my understanding, these boxes are basically local copies of the entire Netflix online catalog - a catalog that frequently changes. How do these ~15,000 machines pick up new content? I assume they synchronize with the Netflix mothership every once in a while. My question (without any intent to trivialize what Netflix is doing) is, isn't that just a good-old caching system? But it makes me wonder if it would be po…
So, Bittorrent ? It _would_ be a perfect setup (much much better than sending the same stream through the same lines just because 2 persons are watching the same show) The problem here is not technical (Bittorrent solves that) the problem is societal: for most of the content that is of interest to population, you are not allowed to redistribute it. So Netflix has to DRM-protect the content for everyone, meaning that…
I haven't really explored PopCorn Time but I'll take a look.
With regards to DRM, the content must be de-protected before you watch it - so if Netflix installed a mini-box on my network, they could decrypt it to let me watch the show, and encrypt it to store on the device before it is sent to someone else. The key itself could be retrieved from the a centralized server.
If I think about it some more, there really is no need to keep an entire Netflix catalog in every location. As I mentioned, they have usage data and a strong prediction system too, so predicting the next show that will be watched in an area and even when would be "straight-forward" (In quotes because it wouldn't be easy for me to do it, but I think it would be easy for Netflix).
Another thing Netflix could try is pre-fetching shows during off-hours. That would work well for binge show watchers, and reduce peak time traffic.