TV’s Arrested Development (Thank a Data Center)

Beginning May 26, George Sr., Michael, Gob, Lindsay and the whole wacky Bluth family are streaming back into America’s living rooms… on our televisions… or our computers… or even our mobile devices. In what may be one of the most arresting developments to rock conventional television broadcasting, the cult-favorite early 2000’s sitcom Arrested Development is being given new life by, of all things, the digital streaming model of Netflix. While it may not be time to throw away your cable boxes just yet, Netflix is using its data center powered broadband muscle to change the way television is delivered while also turning Hollywood upside down by developing its own original programming – I can’t think of a better show to make this happen. How does this work?  You can start off by thanking a data center.

Some simple facts – a typical 30-minute HD program stream requires about 1500MB of data to flow from the host (in this case Netflix) to the end user (you). By comparison, a two-hour HD movie requires about 3600MB.  Multiply that by millions of users and roll in services like Hulu, Facebook and YouTube and you’ve got lots of data flying around at the speed of light. In fact, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, a zettabyte of data will cross the Internet in 2016 – what’s a zettabyte you ask? That’s 1 million petabytes or 1.1 trillion gigabytes (putting that into perspective, 1.1 Trillion 1GB thumb-drives laid end-to-end would span roughly the same distance as a round trip between Los Angeles and London.) Further, given current growth rates, according to an IDC study, the digital universe will be about 35 zettabytes by 2020. How will we handle all of this data? Activities like streaming media to big data analytics to core business applications like Oracle and SAP wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for strategically located and well run data centers.

Companies looking to solidify their IT infrastructure and / or capitalize on cloud computing resources to house their data for streaming, storage or processing are driving demand for high-capacity, custom-built data centers. Is your company ready to handle the demands of modern business?

May 26 is right around the corner but in the meantime, remember… “There’s always money in the banana stand.”