Isn't this just a CDN? ISPs quite happily host Akamai and Google nodes -- are they being paid for maintenance of those? Empirically, from an old job, the answer is <i>no</i> (in fact, we had to petition for quite a while to get some Google boxen), but that's in a country at the tail end of a long, long pipe. Is it different in the US?
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?<p>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 random reads.<p>I would have assumed that having even 100 people streaming from a single box would be an interesting challenge.
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)?
I'd be interested to find out more of hardware details of these devices. 100+ TB of storage in a 4U is pretty respectable. From the images in the article, it looks like the drives are <i>not</i> hot-swappable, so I'd guess Netflix is able to remotely track loss of redundancy and will just send out an entire replacement unit when needed.<p>For comparison, Supermicro makes one of the highest-density storage servers that I'm aware of[1]. 72 3.5" drives in 36 drive bays, so up to 288tB of raw storage, if you're brave enough to use 4tB drives.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R72L2K.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-...</a>
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.<p>My question (without any intent to trivialize what Netflix is doing) is, isn't that just a good-old caching system?<p>But it makes me wonder if it would be possible to create a distributed, localized caching system? For example, if I watch The Avengers, my machine could be configured to cache a part (or all) of the movie. The more people watch it, the more it is distributed. Since Netflix can correlate location data with what movies are watched, they can target certain areas to cache certain movies more aggressively. When the next person in my neighborhood watches The Avengers, they would pull part of the movie from me (maybe the beginning until the rest buffers) and cache another part of it themselves for the next person in line. That way all the people in my neighborhood or adjacent neighborhoods don't have to pull the entire movie across the internet every time - instead, we help each other watch movies with higher quality.<p>On second thought, this may not be cheap considering the amount of development that may be required (and, at the end of the day, someone has to pay for this storage - although Netflix could, for example, offer personal mini-caching boxes in exchange for a monthly discount), but it's fun to dream about a sanctioned, decentralized, peer-to-peer movie service.
If the ISPs are reclassified as common carriers, will they still be allowed to let Netflix install those boxes?<p>Presumably there is limited space in the ISP data center, so they cannot let everyone who wants to stick a box in there do so, so I'm wondering what methods a common carrier can use to decide which content providers can have access, and how this fundamentally differs from the "fast lanes" that common carrier status is supposed to prevent.
Lot of mistakes in this article, afair it can't hold all the movies but just the most popular.
<a href="http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pd...</a><p>" Each appliance stores a portion of the catalog, which in general is less than the complete content
library for a given region. Popularity changes, new titles being added to the service, and re-
encoded movies are all part of the up to 7.5TB of nightly updates each cache must download to
remain current. We recommend setting up a download window during off-peak hours when there is
sufficient free capacity."