Category Archives: Content delivery network

Alcatel-Lucent, Content & Applications, Content delivery network, Google, News & Analysis

Google and Alcatel announce content delivery network upgrades to cloud services

contentTwo major content delivery network (CDN) technology announcements have highlighted the strategic importance of CDN in delivering content without lag and latency.

Google’s Cloud Platform is to be sped up by the addition of four new content delivery networks, it has announced. The addition of CloudFlare, Fastly, Highwinds Network and Level 3 Communications to Google’s network of 70 points of presence in 33 countries forms part of Google’s new CDN Interconnect programme, which falls within the Google Cloud Interconnect line.

The plan is to cut prices for joint customers of the CDN providers and Google Cloud Platform when the customer’s traffic moves from the Google cloud to the CDN, it said. Google’s Cloud Platform product manager Ofir Roval said the additions are needed to speed delivery of rich media payloads from the Google Cloud Platform to end-user devices. Emerging web and mobile apps ‘carry hefty media assets’ which, he blogged, explains the need for new CDN additions, according to a report in The Light Reading. In time dependent enterprise business systems, users are unlikely to tolerate ‘laggy’ unresponsive applications, said Roval.

In November the cloud vendor launched Google Carrier Interconnect, to help link enterprise customers to the Google cloud. Partners in the initiative included Verizon, Equinix, Level 3 and Tata Communications.

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent has moved to bolster it cloud-based IP video storage and content delivery technologies with a new Cloud DVR platform and a new Elastic content delivery network. The plan allows service providers to manage network capacity more dynamically as they deal with growing customer demand, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

The Cloud DVR platform incorporates a number of advances in storage resulting from Alcatel-Lucent’s collaboration with Intel and uses the Intel Intelligent Storage Acceleration Library.

With functions moved to the cloud, the Elastic CDN allows resources to be allocated more flexibly, said Paul Larbey, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Video business. “Our IP Video portfolio helps customers better manage the changes in traffic that they are seeing. We can help providers deliver video content more intelligently and efficiently to dramatically improve the end-user experience, in line with demand but without increasing costs.”

Telco TalkTalk has tested components of the enhanced Cloud DVR in a live network environment.

Elastic CDN will be made commercially available in 2016.

Bitcoin, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, Electronic money, Payment

MaxCDN Now Accepting Bitcoin

NetDNA LLC, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, today announced that MaxCDN is the first CDN to accept payment via Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, enables instant peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments with low or zero processing fees. The community-driven software operates with no central authority – managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.

“Developers are a core part of our customer base and have been requesting this payment model,” said Justin Dorfman of NetDNA. “We’re strong believers in open source and part of that commitment is being responsive to developer requests. Bitcoin as the emerging “coin of the realm” for this community and we’re excited at the opportunity to be accepting Bitcoins.”

Business Intelligence, Business Processes, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Leftronic, NetDNA, Partnerships, Y Combinator

NetDNA, YC’s Leftronic Partner on Real-Time CDN Monitoring

Content delivery network provider NetDNA today announced its partnership with Y-Combinator-funded Leftronic, to develop high-performance, secure and real-time data visualization dashboards for its CDN services.

Now, NetDNA or MaxCDN customers can get a bird’s-eye view of their traffic, including daily, weekly or monthly statistics on popular files, popular file types, status codes, cache hit percentage, statistics by location and more.  All of which are presented in a Web browser using Leftronic’s real-time, large screen metric dashboard platform.

The companies also worked together to provide dashboards measuring traffic on NetDNA’s Bootstrap CDN project, samples of which are available online.

“We’re excited to be partnering with Leftronic because monitoring traffic is a critical step to receiving the full benefits of our CDN service.  Now they can do that in a big and beautiful way using only a browser,” said Justin Dorfman, NetDNA’s Developer Advocate.

“We could see an immediate synergy between our two companies when NetDNA shared with us the demand for better CDN reporting it saw in its customer base,” said Rajiv Ghanta, CEO of Leftronic. “The company is truly developer friendly with its well-supported API and fast customer support.  We’re looking forward to a lasting relationship with the company.”

Leftronic has created a data visualization platform that helps companies monitor and track their business metrics. The platform has no software to download, instead everything is shown in a Web browser for easy accessibility and organization. The technology is combined with a simple-to-use front-end interface for visualizing the data and has an API for integrating custom company data.

With more than 10,000 customers trusting its content delivery services, NetDNA provides simple, efficient and affordable web performance optimization solutions that help customers to increase and improve their website speed. Most recently, NetDNA’s MaxCDN service has been its leading, popular solution among businesses because of its easy sign up system and versatile web performance acceleration.

 

Amazon AWS, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, NetDNA EdgeCaching, Site Management

NetDNA EdgeRules Gives Websites Control over CDN Content

NetDNA today announced EdgeRules, an instantaneous HTTP caching rules service, giving site managers rapid and granular control over their web content for a better user experience, improved security, lower bandwidth costs and the ability to better monetize content by preventing hotlinking.

EdgeRules is an add-on service to NetDNA’s EdgeCaching and EdgeCaching for Platforms.  Both of these HTTP caching services place site content in NetDNA’s worldwide network of edge servers and peering partners for superior web performance optimization.

Using the EdgeRules control panel, site managers can make changes to their content rules and see them enacted in less than one minute – with no review needed from the NetDNA engineering team. This makes it possible for the first time to test, tweak and deploy very granular controls over how and when content is served.

“EdgeRules truly gives website manages the ability to manage their CDN services their way and to finely tune their pull zone content in a way that they never could before,” said David Henzel, NetDNA vice president of marketing.  “NetDNA is well known for giving site managers unprecedented control over their CDN service through our Control Panel.  With EdgeRules, we are at the forefront of CDN self provisioning again.”

A site manager can use EdgeRules to keep certain files from being proxied and thus protecting them from exposure on the Internet. For example, EdgeRules can prevent the exposure of directory indices due to misconfiguration, which is a common problem on cloud services such as Amazon’s S3 service.

The service allows different rules to be set for different files or classes of data so that frequently updated files can be classed differently from more static data.  This reduces calls to the origin server, which lowers bandwidth charges.

Site managers can also use the service to blacklist certain IP addresses, for example blocking web robots that are scraping data from the site.

The EdgeRules service can also read the operating system of a device and serve up optimized content for that device.  For example a smartphone-optimized image can be served up instead of a large image when the service detects a request from an Android or iOS device.

EdgeRules is now available for all NetDNA EdgeCaching customers.  For more information email sales@netdna.com or go to: http://www.netdna.com/products/add-ons/edgerules/.

CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, EMEA, hybrid cloud, Le Nouvel Observateur, Multimedia & Internet, Networking, Nouvel Observateur, Openmix, User Story

Le Nouvel Observateur Digital Uses Openmix Hybrid CDN Strategy for News Cycle Load Balancing

Sudden traffic load bursts following the news is business as usual for an online news provider. When the news is hot, interruptions and heavy slow-downs are common things on various websites; which can mean loss of audience and consequently loss of revenues, forcing technical teams to constantly anticipate any possible incident.

The third most read news & politics media in France, as per a September 2012 Nielsen study, with almost 8 million unique visitors every month, Le Nouvel Observateur recently chose the Cedexis “Openmix” load balancing solution to roll out and manage its own hybrid CDN — a mix of their infrastructure at origin and their own cache servers spread among various webhosting providers with third parties CDNs.

Rolled out during the second quarter of 2012, Le Nouvel Observateur’s hybrid CDN strategy now includes two content origins, backed by Varnish cache servers, located at two French hosting providers whose performance had been previously measured with Cedexis Radar as being optimum for serving their French audience. A global CDN is also used, mostly to deliver content to their international audience.

Details can be found in a case study published by Cedexis.