Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Concurrent Computer (CCUR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Ox who wrote (2591)	2/10/1998 8:26:00 PM
From: Nimbus	Respond to of 21143

Fibre Channel is replacing SCSI as the high end disk interface standard, essentially to allow easier cabling (FC is not Fibre Optic BTW). It has great bandwidth but data rate is not the issue for VoD disk systems, it's transaction rates .... how many datablocks of MPEG can I pull off of each disk per second to service the cloud of users. My 6,000 stream machine is designed to make 30 disk accesses per second per disk, grabbing a .2 sec chunk of user MPEG2 video data for each access. The more disks I have, the more streams I can serve simultaneously. In one second we grab only 2 megabytes/disk where the disk could actually supply nearly 10 megabytes/sec if only one long access was made. The trick is how the movie data is stripped on the disk array so that the most streams/users can be served without resorting to any buffering/caching which just adds cost and unpredictability of delivery. Bottom line, FC's inherent performance advantage is unuseable, but it's ease of cabling is a plus, especially on large arrays of several hundred drives. We have both SCSI and FC based systems that operate equally well. The 10,000 customers means 10,000 active streams. Usually the ratio is 1 stream for every 4 homes, in other words a 10,000 stream machine can statistically satisfy 40,000 homes, but this has a wide variance to it based on many factors. The "take-rate" as measured by several experimental installations is better than most expected ... in other words, if we have a choice of what to watch, and can FF/REW/Pause, we will use it over watching the real-time programming provided by the networks. The creativity is coming in offering viewers "deals" like FREE News replay on-demand (watch the 6 pm news any time after 6 pm ... come home at 6:15 and you can see it from it's beginning and FF over the commercials) or 25 cent movie periods (1 pm - 4 pm) , people get hooked quick with the right mix of Content, Service Features, and pricing. Just tryin to help here .... Happy Investing !