Facebook CDN

I don't know how this slipped through the cracks, but I've just noticed that Facebook has started hosting some content on static.ak.fbcdn.net [fbcdn presumably = facebook content distribution network]

Is Facebook planning on using multiple CDNs?

Both static.ak.fbcdn.net and static.ak.facebook.com seem to be hosted by Akamai, so for us "lucky" .ac.za we get routed through IS. This is actually good news, as we have a very high-speed connection to IS from TENET. Unfortunately, most institutions connect slowly into TENET (~30 Mbps for UCT!) and implement some shaping on popular websites. So we don't get most of the benefit.

Science bandwidth requirements estimate

A recent e-mail from a Meraka engineer working on SANReN:

We know eVLBI would require a 1Gb all the way to Amsterdam, current projections for full SKA is 100GB international capacity, the MeerKAT project will probably require 10GB of bandwidth.

So something like the 'bandwidth glut' of Infraco would definitely be required.

It seems like the only people talking about having too many cables are those with a vested interest in having only a few [competing] cables.

Extra transit for TENET

Viewing the monitoring graphs for TENET's London node, a new transit circuit through DataHop [web?]is apparent:


Peak speeds are about 50 Mbps. Combined with the Telia peak of ~100 Mbps, this means TENET currently has ~150 Mbps peak transit.

Note the very small outbound. Mmmm, eyeballs.

Unscheduled scheduled outages

A recent posting to the TENET ren-news list:

All Neotel MPLS GEN3 sites experienced a number of service failures
early yesterday morning. It appears that these were caused by Neotel
maintenance, of which TENET was not informed in advance.

even given

The Service Level Agreement provides that: "...The Providers will give TENET four days' advance notice of planned maintenance."

Let's hope Neotel doesn't become Neotelkom [the new Telkom?] :)

ICTS vs users

For some reason there is an article praising UCT ICTS's War on Terror...er...Bandwidth:

[snip lots]
ICTS has implemented Packeteer Packetshaper
[snip lots more]

AFAIK this actually happened ages ago. So there's no real reason to trot this out now unless people are griping that GEN3 isn't doing much for them.

And there's no mention of what will happen once:

• UCT transitions to SANReN and has a 10 Gbps link to the local node, and
• TENET moves to the 10 Gbps overseas pipe due mid-2009

I don't see the Packeteer appliance scaling to multi-Gbps speeds without serious extra $$$ invested. And would it be worth doing so?

Consider this paper on web search clickstreams http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1177080.1177110]:

The MWN [Munich Scientific Network] provides a 10Gbit/s singly-homed Internet connection to roughly 50,000 hosts at two major universities along with additional institutes; link utilization is typically only around 200–500 Mbit/s in each direction.

Now this might have been back in 2006; it doesn't really matter if the traffic demand has doubled since then. Also, since major local and international peering will then be in effect, actual transit pressure should decrease.

C'mon ICTS - plan ahead now!