Rock Band Live's Second Act: Networks and Data Centers 52
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."
100 Gbit? (Score:2)
100Gbit doesn't sound that fast for a datacenter interconnect.
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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.
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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.
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But you move much more data internally than externally. All computing systems are built like that. You have much more bandwidth from memory to CPU than to disk.
If you are replicating data, then you do not have more data flowing out of your data center than you have data flowing in you data center. Assuming symmetric links you can always replicate all your data.
If you are periodically replicating ALL your data instead of sending diff, then you will hit a bottleneck whatever your out bandwidth is.
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100Gbit doesn't sound that fast for a datacenter interconnect.
Not everyone can afford those super fancy Chinese 2 Tbit fiber links. These (obviously) aren't tier 1 markets either, so they should be fine with petty 100 Gig links. If you can find other data centers across central PA that are better connected, do share.
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The current speed of the equipment at each end is fairly meaningless; the big expense is actually laying the fiber in the first place. Optical equpiment keeps getting more speed out of the same ol' single mode fiber. It won't be just one fiber either, it will be a whole bunch, so really it can be "100GBit * some # of fibers" from the get-go.
Live's first album "Mental Jewelry" is worth listening to if you've never heard it. Much less meaningless-pseudo-hard-rock than you might expect if you've just heard the
Two words... (Score:2)
Datacenter groupies.
Misleading title (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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I thought Rock Band Live was a game.
they certainly capitalized it as if it were.
and in other news, guys with money are investing money.
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and will is a douche, giving cheap advertisement value in exchange of a "real job" title(it's not a real job - if it were, he would have been doing a terrible, terrible job at it too!).
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Yes, it can be read multiple ways. No, it was not capitalized improperly.
It's (Rock Band) (Live), not (Rock Band Live).
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You're totally right, but looking at slashdot's main page right now, most of the articles have each word capitalized except for articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. (I see one "For" capitalization.)
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Glad I wasn't the only one.
Can't really blame slashdot on this one, though... the band has a hard name to parse. "Live building a datacenter," sounds like a video where we watch construction crews, live!
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Cedar Fair, once had a stage show called "Rock Band, Live" [ign.com], which was a spectacular failure now regarded as a bit of a joke within the company. The audience basically got to watch one lucky person play Rock Band on stage, with some dancers dressed as characters. I'm not sure who thought that "watching other people play video games" would be entertaining enough for a show, but apparently it passed through several layers of management.
It was produced by an outside company, so I find it hilarious to think that
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I presume you're joking (due to the 2nd paragraph), but at least from what I've seen in media coverage, in other countries, people *do* do this. For example, professional gamers in IIRC Japan and/or South Korea, and others pay to watch them play.
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Not joking at all, sadly.
Professional gamers are interesting to watch, because they're on a different level than the spectators. Their tactics and speed are impressive, pushing the limits of human ability, making a competitive video game into a sporting event.
Random passers-by at an amusement park aren't quite so interesting. As I understand it, the first few weeks of shows had a pre-show try-out to assert that guests had some modicum of skill, but by the end of the season anyone who could bash on an instru
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This is the part that I thought was a joke:
This slashdot thread has NOTHING to do with the stage show to which you're referring.
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Ah. I thought the "misleading title" thread would be about a misleading title... and that's what the title led me to think about.
The summary eased my fears a bit.
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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!"
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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).
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Yep. Even better, "I'm listening to the recorded version of a Live album".
To be honest, those are some of my favorite band names. The The, The Who, The Band, etc. Someone on a forum once quipped that they'd love to start two bands who'd go on tours together, so they could announce, We're "Still Here"! Now stick around, for "More Crap"! I'd totally do that. (Barring having a second band, I suppose you could just name your band "Still Here", and have a song called "More Crap" instead.)
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Indeed it does. (Then underneath it links to the totally unrelated M band [wikipedia.org] :D - I'm gonna go ahead and add a "if you were looking for" link there...)
Does remind me of a quote from a friend back in college, when he was working on some paper for a class:
"How to stump Google:
Try to find a painting called "Orchestra" by an artist who is much less famous than the orchestra conductor he shares a name with."
Confusing Title (Score:3, Insightful)
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You mean we're not? [cedarfair.com]
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Server Crashes (Score:5, Funny)
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
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You have no idea how badly I wish I had mod points right now!
Someone please mod this up!!!
Before Lady Gaga (Score:1)
won't be (Score:1)
New lyrics (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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And I am not AC in fear of a take down notice!
No longer Throwing Copper... (Score:2)
...next album: Throwing Fiber?
What a letdown. (Score:1)