Video services demand new efficiencies
With the growth in online video, next-gen systems offer environmental benefits – and lower operational costs, says Tom Rosenstein, vice-president of product marketing at Verivue...
With the growth in online video, next-gen systems offer environmental benefits – and lower operational costs, says Tom Rosenstein, vice-president of product marketing at Verivue...
The explosive growth in online video consumption is evident. Competitive forces, together with changing consumer behavior are shaping new business models. The lines are blurring between TVs and desktops, not to mention mobile devices. Cable and telco operators are reacting, providing IP television services with larger libraries and a proliferation of data-intensive High-Definition content.
By 2013, studies expect Internet traffic—in this case a broad category that includes delivery of content to televisions and mobile phones—to more than quadruple in size. Operators beware: more than 90% of this Internet traffic will come from video.
Clearly, there are important challenges ahead and the need to be more efficient than ever before. Racks of servers are multiplying with commensurate increases in complexity and hidden costs. It’s an untenable situation – operationally as well as environmentally.
Traditional data center solutions were once able to rely on COTS (commercial off-the- shelf) products to provide the storage and bandwidth for video services. But it’s a linear scaling model that is completely contradictory to data center efficiency practices.
The increasing power consumption and space requirements of legacy PC-based systems are not sustainable. Green initiatives are an important imperative for any business and data centres consume significant energy. Electricity consumption in data centres, including enterprise servers, ICT equipment, cooling equipment and power equipment, is expected to contribute significantly to the electricity consumption of the EU commercial sector in the near future. In western European this consumption is expected to grow from 56 terawatt hours per year in 2007 to 104 TW h/yr by 2020.
The EU programme Intelligent Energy Europe aims at demonstrating the high saving potentials due to efficient server technology -- with good reason. As video services continue to proliferate, your data centres will consume a disproportionate amount of resources.
New generation systems
To meet the needs of future generations, new systems have emerged specifically engineered for the massive amounts of video traffic expected. They’re pragmatic solutions that offer a critical alternative to sprawling racks of commodity servers, network adapters, cables and supporting LAN switches and firewalls cluttering already overheated datacenters and head-ends.
This new generation reflects common new characteristics to watch for: tighter integration: smaller footprint; blade server platform: independently scaleable I/O and storage; high-speed content ingest, and
power-hungry disk drives replaced by video optimized solid-state drives.
This new class of systems is designed for today’s cable, telco and broadband service environments, with the protocols for VOD, IPTV and oftentimes mobile and other broadband-connected devices.
The good news is that these new systems meet today’s standards for large-scale media services – and they meet today’s standards for our environment.
There are new next-gen systems today that can deliver 200Gbps, while consuming only 4.5 kW of electricity. That compares to traditional disk-based PC server solutions that deliver approximately 2.0Gbps, while consuming an average of 43 kW. Add in the power savings gained by the elimination of supporting ITC networking gear and reduced HVAC costs, which often double the cost of power for a typical datacenter, and this new systems provide over a 20-fold saving in power. It’s a significant reduction in power useage, not to mention in space and complexity.
Linear scaling of commodity systems adds racks upon racks of servers, coupled with the resultant adjunct gear. The growth in premium online content delivery services only ensures that video operations will continue to be strained. Fortunately, operators can take a stand to improve the efficiency of their operations and their responsibility to our environment.
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