DCN November 2016 | Page 31

video latency Internet video surveillance traffic nearly doubled in 2015, from 272 petabytes per month at the end of 2014 to 516 petabytes per month in 2015. Internet video surveillance traffic will increase ten-fold between 2015 and 2020. Globally, 3.9 per cent of all Internet video traffic will be due to video surveillance in 2020, up from 1.5 per cent in 2015. nScreenMedia also claims that ‘New data from Ericsson and FreeWheel paints a rosy picture for mobile video. Mobile data volume is set to increase seven-fold over the next six years, with video’s share increasing from 50 per cent to 70 per cent. The smartphone looks to be in the driver’s seat.’ To t op this, Forbes reported in September 2015 that ‘Facebook users send on average 31.25 million messages and view 2.77 million videos every minute, and we are seeing a massive growth in video and photo data, where every minute up to 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone.’ Data centres: Be ready! So why are all of these statistics significant? Well, data centres need to be ready for not just the present, but the future and ongoing upsurge in video data. The key problem is that video and audio can be impeded by the effects of network latency. Slow networks can leave the reputations of customers – whose own ‘consumers’ use video for a variety of reasons – tarnished. In a commercial situation, this could lead to lost business. A fast network from any data centre will in contrast engender confidence. ‘You can’t accelerate it all because it’s going at a fixed speed. It’s not just about videoconferencing, it’s about video in general. There are so many different applications for video, and all of them can be affected by bandwidth or latency – or both,’ says David Trossell – CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks. He adds, ‘How we produce and consume and store information has changed dramatically over the past few years with the YouTube and Facebook generation growing up.’ Rearchitect infrastructure ‘Whilst we still absorb much or our information via the written word, we are moving to a much more visual, picture based society. And as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words: a short instruction video of a minute or so, could take 10 times longer to explain with a traditional written manual,’ continues Trossell. This means that data centres, in his view, have to recognise this fact; they have to ‘rearchitect their infrastructure to suit’, and ask, ‘Are we going to have to increase our data storage to accommodate the Content must appear immediately on our PCs, mobiles, tablets, phablets, and smart televisions when and where we want it. increase in storage?’ They also need to realise that many of the traditional techniques for dealing with data such as compression and deduplication are ineffective with compressed video files. He believes the increasing video data volumes will also force data centres to review the bandwidth they have put in place to connect with the outside world. He rightly comments that nobody these days wants to wait. People want their video content now, and they are impatient. Content must appear immediately on our PCs, mobiles, tablets, phablets, and smart televisions when and where we want it. ‘With the rise of data traversing the Internet, the rapid use of more and more entertainment streaming services is going to push the play out to the edges to maintain a service level to the consumer,’ Trossell warns. He adds that this issue is not just 31