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

Figures

[Kawahee]

"Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams"

Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.

Akamai embellishment

[artemis67]

The Akamai figures are the embellishment of the submitter... Cringely doesn't mention Akamai anywhere in the article.

Revenue Streams

[Doc Ruby]

Cringeley doesn't mention Akamai. Where does this 150K max users figure come from? If "tens of thousands" of servers is only 10K servers, then 150K streams is only 15 streams:server.

But even a $2K P4/4.3GHz can serve over 1750 simultaneous 500Kbps video streams (from my own benchmarks), for 875Mbps. Since Gbps fiberoptics cost <$5000:mo, or under $3:stream:mo, 10K servers should serve at least 17 million simultaneous users; 58K servers serve over 100 million simultaneous streams.

Use more efficient servers, like SANs coupled more directly to routers, and you're talking about <$3:stream:mo for maybe 100K servers serving over 1 billion people, for a $100M investment that can be amortized over a few years. Years which can bring maybe $1-100:mo profit on 1-10 billion consumers, or 10-10,000x ROI.

Such a network is much more efficient and economical as P2P, or multicast. But even the raw numbers sound very profitable. That's why Akamai is making so much money, even though their market is still so small.