Comments on: Let’s make data centers obsolete

By: Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:42:46 +0000

Richard: Actually, it pays to “warehouse” it briefly even when it goes to a few people. When we send e-mail, for example, an upstream server “warehouses” the data long enough to distribute the copies to the individual recipients. It also protects against spam. (We all know what “any to any” connectivity did to the medium of e-mail until we got sensible and insisted that users transmit their mail through servers. If we hadn’t done that, e-mail would already be completely useless.)

Scott: The fact is that a server across the country is almost certain to be “closer,” network-wise, to someone on a different ISP in Texas than you are. And if you are only sending a few copies of something to a relative (Interesting how often P2Pers claim that this is what they’re doing!), the impact of one file traveling a few extra miles is negligible compared to the impact of P2P. In fact, without the congestion caused by P2P, it’ll get through a lot faster locally.

As for the location of the “middle”: it consists of major Internet hubs, peering points, co-location centers, and backbone facilities. The Palo Alto Internet Exchange, located in an unassuming former telephone building on Ramona Street in downtown Palo Alto, California, is probably the most important of these.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:35:44 +0000

Brett, why would I want to send my stuff to California or North Carolina for use by people who are exclusively in Texas? Seriously, why waste the bandwidth? It can be used for something else, like Euro-porn, or people in North Carolina uploading family photos.

There is no repeatedly here, either. None. I’m not running a global enterprise with 25/8 worker drones, I’m showing my mom her great-grandkids playing in the sprinkler Or showing my primary customer the layout of his network. All of whom are right here in 200 or 300 fiber miles (and often way less), not thousands.

BTW, where is the middle? It’s a cloud, or pretty dang close to what I always imagined.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:08:23 +0000

How often is repeatedly? If the content only goes to a few people, most of them friends and family, it’s not worth the trouble to warehouse it remotely.

By: Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:09:01 +0000

Any content that originates at the edge can (and should be) sent to the middle for widespread distribution. It costs far too much, and involves too much latency and other overhead, to send it from the edge repeatedly.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:09:14 +0000

I hope you document your prototype. I’ve been fooling around with edge/home/media servers for the last 12 months in off-hours. I haven’t gotten anywhere with it, because I’ve got higher-priority things to do, but the potential is easy to see. I can see plenty of things that I’d rather keep on a mirrored edge server. Google Docs for my biz, for one tiny example.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:17:58 +0000

I don’t think search is the issue, Brett, content delivery is. And it’s pretty clear that triple-play and VoD are major interests of telcos and cablecos. It’s also clear that the telcos that have high-capacity cable plants are interested in leveraging the investment.

There are many applications that can’t be centralized in server farms at all, because the content originates at the edge, such as personal communications in all of its many forms. And there are other forms of content that warrant caching inside the ISP network for various reasons. So it follows that personal data of most kinds lends itself to caching inside the home network, with a fast pipe to the outside world. That’s one reason we have remote desktop software, isn’t it?

By: Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:25:47 +0000

Richard, I do not think that the telcos — which are [your company's] largest customers — really care whether Google is the king of search or not. Yes, they could conceivably have been Google’s competitors, but they’ve decided to sit that dance out. Nor do they really want their consumers to be using large amounts of bandwidth even if it IS low priority, because it still costs. And because, if history is any guide, many users won’t accept the idea that the applications are low priority, will get impatient with them (because they want absolutely EVERYTHING to be instant), and want them to be high priority.

In any event, the bottom line is that shifting servers to the edge of the network is always a bad idea. It’s not any more or less “democratic,” because you can always feed the raw data to a server from the edge. But it doesn’t make sense to distribute from the edges.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:56:45 +0000

Actually I do think the ISPs who buy home gateways from suppliers like the company I work for would go for something like this. They want consumers to use large amounts of bandwidth for low-priority applications, and want to break Google’s strangle-hold. I agree that the piracy companies., such as Vuze, aren’t interested in slow downloads, but they’re not the target.

And the NDC would be more than a P2P box, it will be your gateway to the Internet for mobile devices and what-not.

By: Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:21:28 +0000

Do you think for a minute that the makers of these boxes, or the content providers behind them, would settle for “scavenger class?” Especially when one of the things that motivates them to use P2P is that it hacks the net so as to take PRIORITY over other traffic? I don’t think so. I think that their intent is to try to take as much bandwidth as they can, at the expense of ISPs, without paying for it.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:13:52 +0000

There you go, a key part of the system.