Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers

Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"

Comments

Change the paradigm

[cos(0)]

Sure, currently 150,000 copies of data puts a large strain on the servers... what about one copy broadcast via multicast, much akin to airwaves?

Re:Change the paradigm

[MMaestro]

Then how do you control it? Its the same problem with radio. At least with radio you make the majority of profit from sponsors and advertisement so theres no need to control distribution (not to mention the fact that its relatively cheap to setup a radio station). So its 'ok' if you have no control of who hears the content. (More ears = more audience = more sponsors)

But when you put it online (multicasting, Bittorrent, whatever) how do you tell whats your audience? You can't track them, hackers would go insane and tear the tracking code out. Centralizing is too cumbersome (bandwidth costs would skyrocket) and de-centralization (Napster) only works if people 'opt-in' to whatever crazy system the company picks. The iTunes store does fairly well as a centralized system, but even Apple has admitted this, their profits are virtually a joke in terms of actual cash amount.

Predictions

[chris macura]

Great. Another prediction on what technology will or will not be able to do in the near future.

We all know how accurate these are.

Also: There is a difference between serving the exact same fucking content, at the same time to 1 million people and generating custom pages on-demand for 1 million people.

Re:The problem already has a solution

[ExE122]

I think the key issue is that everyone is asking for flawless, high quality, on demand data streams. We currently have streaming broadcasts over a User Datagram Protocol.

The difference between UDP and other protocols is that UDP does not ensure that packets are not lost. This works well for audio and video because if you miss a frame or two, you probably won't notice too much. This is the equivalent of broadcasting a signal over the air waves. Sometimes it'll be a little fuzzy, but you can still understand what's being sent.

But like I mentioned before, UDP streaming broadcasts will not give you a high quality, 100% accurate and on demand data stream. That's why we're focussing on P2P instead.

I think the worries over the datacenters is a bit unfounded at the moment. 10 years ago, using 1GB of harddrive space and ever needing more than a 14.4kbps modem seemed insane. But now things are different. And the cable tv to internet swtich won't happen overnight. I think our technology will catch up by the time it catches on.

Re:Akamai embellishment

[Anonymous Coward]

We are serving around 120k concurrent streams on Akamai every day. We are throwing their model for a spin though. Akamai's network is geared for global broadcast. We are radio stations, so we have many individual broadcasts and the demand on them is local to the broadcast point.

In some datacenters Akamai has only a few servers, so the logic of picking the closest server to meet the listner can backfire if that datacenter has limited capacity.