RE: [kDev] Serve Kendra Initiative!...

["Freeman, Andi" <andi.freeman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My feelings are that we should get something up and running first and worry
about quality of service after some basic testing has done, otherwise we
slow up the research for the sake of getting a suitable SLA. I understand
that backup is important but if this was a daily backup to start of with
then this would be enough (once again we aren't trying to build a highly
available commercial service yet only an experimental server so we can
progress other issue). We do redudant streaming here at Streamway for
corporate webcasts, the clients can double the cost of their webcast and we
provide redundant links via satellite and ISDN VC to avoid using the
'unreliable' internet. To date we have never had to use a redundant path
during a webcast so my feeling is that this is a lot of effort for not a lot
of gain and not really worthwhile while we have a 'beta' audience and dont
have firm plan for the future from a tech point of view, in essence the game
plan at the moment is to use off the shelf technology and see how well it
works for the purpose at hand, I well imagine that in a stepwise fashion we
will introduce experimental tech from other sources into the equation (maybe
something from City U, maybe something from Compaq/Dell) and glue the whole
lot together with our own code on the server.

>From my reading of the documentation for G2 splitting it would seem a
unicast stream is required from the source server for each split stream
meaning that bandwidht usage is cumulative for each edge server, meaning
that we could chew through some bandwidth if this scenario still exists can
anyone confirm or deny this ? I presume this is so that stats for all usage
are collected on the source server ? So we are looking at needing like T1
connectivity to keep it running if we intend to have a few split servers (I
guess I need to do more reading on this one, you would think our best bet is
to multicast the split stream if possible, but is this possible given the
current situation (that is we dont control the routers)). Things seem to
come back to multicast tunneling in my mind. What do others think and are
there any implemntations of multicast tunneling that anyone knows of (I know
there has been some talk on the Secure Multicast lists but is there anything
out there apart from what Akamai have done themselves already ? and maybe
some other CDN's as well). 

suggestions...


| Andi Freeman                               +44(0)2075396165 (t) |
| Streamway Ltd                           +44(0) 20 7539 6179 (f) |
| Black Eagle Brewery                     +44(0) 7799 898 678 (m) |

| 15 Hanbury Street                           www.streamway.co.uk |
| LONDON E1 6QR __________________________________________________|

Disclaimer
This e-mail is strictly confidential and may also be legally privileged. If
you are not the addressee please do not read, print, re-transmit, store or
act in reliance on it or any attachments. Instead, please email it back to
the sender and then immediately permanently delete it. Streamway Ltd does
not accept legal responsibility for this message. Any comments presented are
solely those of the author and do not represent those of Streamway Ltd.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Harris [mailto:daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 28 February 2001 15:57
> To: k-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [kDev] Serve Kendra Initiative!...
> 
> 
> Hi there All,
> 
> Currently the kI website is running off a shared server. This is 
> restricting us somewhat as we can't give out root access and all that 
> stuff. So, we need to host kI on a dedicated server. There 
> are lots of 
> people we can approach and I reckon it wont be a problem 
> getting use of 
> kit. What I'd like to know is what do we need?
> 
> kI isn't mission critical but it would be really nice for it 
> not to be down 
> for too long. Another ting is the database (very small) of contacts, 
> mailing lists, servers, etc is precious and I'd say we'd want 
> it backed up 
> every 4 hours.
> 
> So far, all I can think of is stuff like having backup 
> devices built in. Do 
> we want 2 servers? One live and one for backup? Have them on 
> different 
> networks? Copy database across from live to backup?
> 
> I'm keen that whoever provides the servers does it as a 
> service so all the 
> hardware is just looked after.
> 
> On the right track? Please discuss and question on list and 
> build up a list 
> of requirements.
> 
> Cheers Daniel 
>