It seems pretty clear... If your provider worked with Netflix you could get 1080p... If I'd didn't, you couldn't. Now you can get it with any broadband provider. Correct?
My guess would be that they're using a lossless compression method.
You'd be wrong. Lossless 1080p would require hundreds of megabits per second even for the most efficient of codecs. There is no way you're getting lossless video compression in a 5 to 7 megabit stream at 1080p.
"The hard drives are not hot swappable, because we wish to avoid the operational burden of field service."
I don't understand this reasoning. By making hard drives more difficult or time consuming to replace, aren't they actually increasing the "operational burden of field service"?
"The hard drives are not hot swappable, because we wish to avoid the operational burden of field service."
I don't understand this reasoning. By making hard drives more difficult or time consuming to replace, aren't they actually increasing the "operational burden of field service"?
That was my first thought, but after reading the darn thing, they apparently leave the dead drives in; they're not in a RAID. And with 36 drives in there, I guess they'll just wait till the majority of them die. Or something.
That was my first thought, but after reading the darn thing, they apparently leave the dead drives in; they're not in a RAID. And with 36 drives in there, I guess they'll just wait till the majority of them die. Or something.
I don't think that there's 36 drives in one unit. Once all the drives in a single unit (4-6) dies then all the drives can be replaced at once.
That was my first thought, but after reading the darn thing, they apparently leave the dead drives in; they're not in a RAID. And with 36 drives in there, I guess they'll just wait till the majority of them die. Or something.
I don't think that there's 36 drives in one unit. Once all the drives in a single unit (4-6) dies then all the drives can be replaced at once.
And from a cost perspective, I understand that they don't wanna swing by the data center every time a drive dies.
To achieve over 100 TB of storage, spinning hard drives provide the highest affordable density, in particular 36 3TB SATA units. The hard drives are not hot swappable, because we wish to avoid the operational burden of field service. For lower power utilisation and simpler sourcing we select commodity units from two vendors and use software to manage failure modes and avoid field replacement. Dead drives reduce the total storage available for the system, but don't take it offline. We also add 1 TB of flash storage (2 solid state drives) for system files, logs and popular content. To augment the motherboard attached controller, we use two 16 port LSI SAS controller cards that connect directly to the SATA drives. This avoids I/O bottlenecks of SATA multipliers or SAS expanders, and also reduces system complexity.
Comments
My guess would be that they're using a lossless compression method.
You'd be wrong. Lossless 1080p would require hundreds of megabits per second even for the most efficient of codecs. There is no way you're getting lossless video compression in a 5 to 7 megabit stream at 1080p.
Quote:
Their "Open Connect Appliance Hardware" is a good read:
https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware
"The hard drives are not hot swappable, because we wish to avoid the operational burden of field service."
I don't understand this reasoning. By making hard drives more difficult or time consuming to replace, aren't they actually increasing the "operational burden of field service"?
Yes I used the wrong wording, not all 1080p is the same. Picture quality depends on the codec used.
That was my first thought, but after reading the darn thing, they apparently leave the dead drives in; they're not in a RAID. And with 36 drives in there, I guess they'll just wait till the majority of them die. Or something.
I don't think that there's 36 drives in one unit. Once all the drives in a single unit (4-6) dies then all the drives can be replaced at once.
Well, that's what they wrote. It's a big-ass-box:
And from a cost perspective, I understand that they don't wanna swing by the data center every time a drive dies.