The BBC is using solid state disk memory served from a dedicated data center to stream popular content such as its Saturday night light entertainment show Strictly Come Dancing.

The organisation's iPlayer online system requires its own specially set up data center in which its most popular content is stored on SSD media.

High capacity and low latency are key to making iPlayer work and the broadcaster has had to invest to ensure that its most popular content is not affected by time lags when it is accessed through its online viewing platform, iPlayer.

Paul Boyns, head of policy and IT strategy at the BBC told datacenterdynamics that streaming content to the internet has had a big impact on its data center strategy which meant it needed a specific tier of data center.

Boyns said that when content such as its Saturday evening entertainment show Strictly Come Dancing was accessed through iPlayer it needed the speed of flash memory to cope with demand.

'We use solid state disk for popular content just to get the throughput we need. It has had an impact on the enterprise data center strategy because in addtion to a traditional enterprise data center we have to have high capacity and low latency streaming out to the internet. That requires a specific type of facility that wouldn't be economical for email and file and print services. So it has meant we have a specific tier of data center for the on demand content distribution. We do know the energy consumption of that facility is, because it is a ring fenced activity and therefore we are able to project ahead," he said.

'We have thought about what that is going to do to our carbon footprint and how we can improve that. So we use solid sate disk in order to get the throughput we need. It also reduces the energy consumption on those sites. As much as possible we're trying to make sure we have the information and data in the right place. It is going from distribution data centers, then we're demoting it into an enterprise data center, and then arching it on to tape. We promote and demote material to get the best bang for the buck.'

Read the interview online in the digital edition of the December/January issue of DatacenterDynamicsFOCUS