On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 3:06 AM, <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
I doubt we'll ever see the day when running gigabit across town becomes cost effective when compared to running gigabit to the other end of your server room/cage/whatever.
You show me the ISP with the majority of their userbase located at the other end of their server room, and I'll concede the argument.
Last time I looked the eyeballs were across town so I already have to deliver my gigabit feed across town. My theory is that you can achieve some scaling advantages by delivering it from multiple locations instead of concentrating one end of that gigabit feed in a big blob data center where the cooling systems will fail within an hour or two of a major power systems failure.
It might be worth the effort to actually operate a business with real datacenters and customers before going off with these homilies. Experience says that for every transaction sent to the user, there are a multiplicity of transactions on the backend that need to occur. This is why the bandwidth into a datacenter is often 100x smaller than the bandwidth inside the datacenter. Communication within a rack, communication within a cluster, communication within a colo and then communication within a campus are different than communication with a user. /vijay
--Michael Dillon