ESPN
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Need to handle over 10000 request per second
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Heavy reliance on web page caching
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This approach won’t work with personalized content
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Need to store over 10 million users
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On average each user has 5 kilobytes of data
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With redundancy we’re looking at roughly 200 gb
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That certainly won’t fit into a single JVM, or even 100
They have to handle all this information for
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Mobile
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Soccernet.com
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Deportes.com
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How they solved the problem at ESPN?
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The grid
IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale
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10 Servers x 20 gb of RAM each = 200 gb
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Load 12 million fans with 40% room to grow
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Handles 15000 requests per second
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Low CPU usage
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Full redundancy
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WebSphere eXtreme Scale operates as an in-memory grid that dynamically processes, partitions, replicates, and manages application data and business logic across hundreds of servers. It provides transactional integrity and transparent fail-over to ensure high availability, high reliability, and consistent response times. WebSphere eXtreme Scale is an essential distributed caching platform from IBM for elastic scalability and the next-generation cloud environments.
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Transparent application failover (TAF) is the ability of applications to automatically reconnect to the database if the connection fails.
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https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0911_kirby/0911_kirby.html
They built this system in 3 months
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ESPN Sports Center
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Video processing 4K and 8K
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Dedicated to broadcast life 18 hours a day
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The relationship with the audience has changed
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Social media image and video quality vs ESPN
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TV is changing, people are cancelling their subscriptions but they still need to figure out how to deal with that
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Everything is changing all the time and you don’t know what it is coming
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Serve the audience with sports content anywhere, anytime, and on any platform
Questions
1. How many requests from users does ESPN receive each second? Do you think this is a consistent pattern or does it have peaks and valleys? When does it peak?
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With over 110 million unique global online visitors, ESPN receives an avalanche of requests for information services every second of every day.
2. Why does ESPN store personal information and preferences on its databases and how does this personal information complicate the ability of ESPN to respond to requests from users? Why can’t ESPN just use Web page caching to handle the loads?
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It’s a highly interactive environment, so they use IBM technology called WebSphere eXtreme Scale. eXtreme Scale is a set of software and hardware tools that rely on distributed cache memory as opposed to hard disk drives to access data.
It’s a cache push model. As data comes in asynchronously persist to the database and also asynchronously push to the rest of the cluster. Changes are pushed directly to the consumers which means the consumers to stampede the database to pick up new changes. Not necessary in a more static world of predictable resources, but key to scalability in a mobile world.
In telecommunications, asynchronous communication is transmission of data, generally without the use of an external clock signal, where data can be transmitted intermittently rather than in a steady stream. Any timing required to recover data from the communication symbols is encoded within the symbols.
3. How much information on users does ESPN store? Why does this pose a challenge for ESPN? Can’t it just use a standard 1 terabyte hard drive from a PC? Why can’t it use a single PC?
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ESPN stores roughly 200 gigabytes of information of its users. This poses a challenge for ESPN because that have to store so much information that this won’t fit in one JVM, 2 or even 100 of them.
So why can’t they use a standard 1 terabyte hard drive from a pc or use a single pc? Well because of the fact that they have to encrypt the information. They will have to use a program that can transform this encrypted information into something that the computer understands in order to have a fast response.
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4. Why is scalability so important to ESPN?
Because they have lots of users with high peaks of demand.
5. How has ESPN handled the rise of Twitter? How has it incorporated Twitter into SportsCenter?
They know social media has changed the way people watch content so they use technology, they offer better quality resolution and camera angles to compete with twitter.
6. What has ESPN, originally a cable-only service, done to adjust to the rise in users canceling their cable subscriptions in favor of unbundling services?
They still need to figure out how to deal with that, but they want to serve the audience with sports content anywhere, anytime, and on any platform with their tv channels, their website and online platforms through their app.
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Link to this information on Evernote
https://www.evernote.com/l/ATl0ff1KSpJFQIPFQztHS_bcCJedT3fbsYc
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