Rock Band Live's Second Act: Networks and Data Centers

Nerval's Lobster writes "Of late, there's been a number of crossovers between technology and entertainment, including the rash of creative directors at brands like Polaroid (Lady Gaga), Intel (Will.i.am) and BlackBerry (Alicia Keys). It's a much rarer thing, though, for rock stars to invest in infrastructure, rather than serve as the 'face' of a brand. But that's exactly what three members of the rock band Live, which sold 20 million albums in its '90s heyday, are doing as their second act: investing in a company that plans on building a 100-Gbit fiber link across Pennsylvania to four data centers. That company, United Fiber and Data (originally known as United Federal Data), will build out a network between New York City and Ashburn, Virginia — providing a low-latency data pipeline that connects offices in Virginia to data centers owned by Wall Street. Supposedly in the name of security, the network will avoid the traditional I-95 corridor, a more direct route used by many other networks."

Comments

Re:100 Gbit?

[godrik]

100Gbit is super expensive as soon as you are not "local". If you need higher bandwidth, you might consider building you data center accross the street of the other one.

Misleading title

[neminem]

I was wondering what sort of crazy plan would lead to the use of Rock Band in a data center. Like, were they using those plastic drums to store hard drives in or something?

Re:Misleading title

[LordNimon]

The only way the title would be clear is if they had written, "The Second Act of Live (the musicians)" And even then, it can still be confusing. Ideally, "Live" should be italicized.

Unfortunately, when you choose a stupid name for your band, you're just going to cause problems. If I see them in concert, do I tell people, "I'm going to see Live live!"

Re:Misleading title

[gman003]

Could be worse. There's a band named "The The", and another one named "The Band".

Still doesn't hold up to "!!!", which is the only band I know of to require the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the ! is an alveolar click, used in some African and Australian languages).

Confusing Title

[Brucelet]

I thought we were talking about a new video game.

Re:100 Gbit?

[hawguy]

100Gbit is super expensive as soon as you are not "local". If you need higher bandwidth, you might consider building you data center accross the street of the other one.

I didn't say it's cheap, but when 10Gbit interfaces are common in the datacenter, 100Gbit doesn't sound like much of an interconnect between datacenters. A mid-scale datacenter probably hosts thousands servers (25 racks is around 1000U of space) and petabytes of data, so it wouldn't take many customers replicating data to the other datacenter to saturate the 100Gbit link.

Even Google Fiber offers 1Gbit links to the home.

Server Crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

oh now feel it comin' back again
like a rollin' system admin
forces pullin' from the data center again
I can feel it.

system crashes, a new server dies
a motherboard falls to the floor
the admin opens her drives
the confusion sets in
before they can run a system restore

New lyrics

[wbr1]

lightning crashes, a new server dies
it's VMs respond no more
the admin opens his eyes
the confusion sets in
as the NOC makes call after call

lightning crashes, and old server dies
its RAID array spinning no more
the admin closes his eyes
he needs more caffeine
to bring up a new server, in under an hour

Cooling fans spinning up again
If he fixes it, it'll feel like a win
RAID 5 stripe parity error again
He can feel it.

lightning crashes, the whole racks dies
blades are smoking in rack four
the admin opens his eyes
red bloodshot eyes
He's tired of putting out all these fires

Cooling fans spinning up again
If he fixes it, it'll feel like a win
RAID 5 stripe parity error again
He can feel it.

No longer Throwing Copper...

[Anthracene]

...next album: Throwing Fiber?