Converged Infrastructure
The Netflix cloud migration stands as another example of converged infrastructure, an operational model which more and more companies are turning to as a way of minimizing disruption while storing, processing, and analyzing massive amounts of data on a daily basis. How much data are we talking about here? Sandvine’s most recent Global Internet Phenomena Report credits real-time entertainment streaming for 70 percent of North American downstream traffic in the peak hours. Five years ago that number was 35 percent. Today, Netflix carries about half of that 70 percent reported by Sandvine. In other words, more than a third of all North American fixed Internet traffic during peak hours comes from Netflix users. Netflix launched its video streaming service in 2007. If you do the math, you might realize what the vision for cloud migration would have been born shortly after that. Then you might wonder how could they be so prescient in their business decisions. It was actually a service outage in their DVD mailing service that sparked the decision. According to the Ars Technica piece:
