{"id":11568,"date":"2018-02-22T11:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T19:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/02\/22\/news-5339\/"},"modified":"2018-02-22T11:00:20","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T19:00:20","slug":"news-5339","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2018\/02\/22\/news-5339\/","title":{"rendered":"Hiccups in HQ Trivia Game Point to Opportunity for Colocation Providers in Delivering Agile Data Centers at the Edge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Greg Jones| Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:26:15 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

My family has caught the HQ trivia bug, but the app is also bugging us, with its tendency for glitches including stalled video. It appears to be an example of an application becoming so popular so fast that the technology platform it runs on can\u2019t keep up. In that, there\u2019s a lesson \u2013 and opportunity \u2013 for colocation providers.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not aware, HQ trivia is a free, interactive iPhone trivia game (with Android in beta as of this writing) where twice a day (3 p.m. and 9 p.m. EST) you get the chance to correctly answer 12 questions to win a share of a real money prize, usually $1,000 or $2,000. Although on Sunday, January 21, the prize was $15,000 \u2013 not coincidentally attracting the largest audience to date,\u00a0more than 1.6 million players<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the game has surged in popularity over the last few months. On Oct. 16 of last year, the 9 p.m. game had\u00a0about 3,600 players<\/a>. On Jan. 7, the 9 p.m. game we played had 1.2 million players, a record at the time \u2013 but a short-lived one.<\/p>\n

\"451<\/a> <\/p>\n

But that popularity has not come without its challenges. I\u2019ve got a reasonably fast Internet connection from my iPhone at home, between 20M to north of 60M, depending on whether I\u2019m connected to the 5GHz or 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band. But still, every time I\u2019ve played I\u2019ve experienced glitches, usually brief disruptions in the live video stream. Once it prevented me from getting an answer in on time, on the very first question, meaning I was bounced from the game, causing my wife to beat me for the 3rd<\/sup>\u00a0consecutive time. Ouch.<\/p>\n

Then there are issues squarely on the HQ end. The 3 p.m. game on Jan. 9 was interrupted twice, with viewers seeing only a screen saying, \u201cTechnical Difficulties.\u201d Each lasted probably no more than a minute, but coming during round 10 it must have seemed like an eternity to anyone still in the game (luckily, perhaps, that didn\u2019t include me). Apparently, HQ has been dealing with technical issues for months, judging from this November tweet:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

HQ is the brainchild of Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, the same duo who co-founded Vine, the six-second video app that Twitter acquired in 2012. Clearly, they have significant mobile video experience. And, according to\u00a0a report in TechCrunch<\/a>, the two have \u201ca few million dollars\u201d funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners to develop video apps. So, money doesn\u2019t seem to be the problem either.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, HQ has not explained the technology behind its game in detail, so it\u2019s hard to say exactly what\u2019s causing the glitches. To gain some insight, I got in touch with Geert Faber, VP, Americas for\u00a0Ex Machina<\/a>, which makes an interactive platform used by TV game shows and other large-scale live streaming applications. Faber wrote\u00a0at least a couple of blog posts<\/a>\u00a0about HQ, including\u00a0this one<\/a>\u00a0discussing its scalability challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn general, you want to ramp up enough capacity before the show starts and scale down when the show is over. This sounds obvious but it requires a custom solution to do this efficiently,\u201d he told me via email. \u201cIn general, our solutions run on AWS within a single region depending on the required scale. However, for redundancy reasons we often run our solution on multiple regions as fallback.\u201d<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re really talking about here is the need for agility, meaning that ability to scale up or down rapidly as required at the edge of the network. The HQ game is perhaps a dramatic example of this requirement, as it needs lots of capacity for only about 15 min., twice per day. But the very existence of companies like Ex Machina, which has plenty of customers using its platform to deliver similar content, shows that customer needs are evolving.<\/p>\n

As companies continue to make use of Internet of Things technology and adopt applications such as interactive video, they will have varying workload requirements. Colocation companies will have a role to play in fulfilling those requirements, whether it\u2019s providing services to Internet Giants like AWS or to customers directly.<\/p>\n

A study by 451 Research makes this point in a recent paper, saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps the most pressing \u2013 and dramatic \u2013 change ahead for the colocation sector will be the need for greater datacenter agility. The term agility has become a buzzword, abused by marketers and often used without associated action. For colocation providers, the meaning will be defined by their customers\u2019 changing expectations, by workload needs, and by the ability of the provider to accommodate new or different requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper goes on to say how some colocation providers are adopting a \u201ccloud mentality,\u201d enabling customers to pay only for what resources they use and accessing data center resources on demand. To pull it off, the providers are implementing data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems and integrating data they produce with billing systems, to enable metered billing.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether HQ can work out its kinks before they start driving users away. But it\u2019s clear that opportunity will be ripe for colocation providers that can step up their agility game. To learn more, download the free 451 Research paper,\u00a0\u201cCustomer Insight\u00a0Future-proofing your colocation business<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The post Hiccups in HQ Trivia Game Point to Opportunity for Colocation Providers in Delivering Agile Data Centers at the Edge<\/a> appeared first on Schneider Electric Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/blog.schneider-electric.com\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Greg Jones| Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:26:15 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

My family has caught the HQ trivia bug, but the app is also bugging us, with its tendency for glitches including stalled video. It appears to be an example of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Hiccups in HQ Trivia Game Point to Opportunity for Colocation Providers in Delivering Agile Data Centers at the Edge<\/a> appeared first on Schneider Electric Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[12389,12388],"tags":[12390,12817,12391,17598,16515,12401,15180,17599,15641,12397],"class_list":["post-11568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scadaics","category-schneider","tag-colocation","tag-colocation-provider","tag-data-center","tag-data-center-agility","tag-data-center-capacity","tag-dcim","tag-ex-machina","tag-hq-trivia","tag-internet-giants","tag-latency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}