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News >> Technology >>
Speedera launches smart storage manager
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 16 September 2003, 19:30 IST
SANTA CLARA: Speedera Networks, the emerging leader in global content delivery services, on Monday announced the introduction of Smart Storage Manager, the first and only policy-based storage management service that enables companies to place the hottest, most popular streaming media and downloadable content on a globally distributed network of servers, closer to users.
Using a configurable policy-based management system, customers can define trade-offs between best performance and lowest cost delivery, including the ability to automatically identify the most frequently requested content and pre-position it on the largest possible edge server network for highest quality and highest performance delivery, while less popular content is delivered from lower cost, centralized servers. Corporations taking advantage of the patent-pending Smart Storage Manager optimize their use of both centralized and edge servers, thus slashing storage and delivery costs.
Using Smart Storage Manager, site administrators can set policies for several key aspects of controlling the delivery of their content, including a popularity threshold that must be reached before a file will be moved from central storage to edge storage locations while a maximum quota of edge storage can also be pre-defined to keep costs under control. In contrast, a simple caching-based approach used by other Content Delivery Network (CDN) service providers does not provide any comparable level of control, since even a single request for a given file will trigger the transfer of that file to an edge server location, with no control over the volume of storage that is thus consumed and no distinction between an often-requested file and a rarely-requested file.
With Smart Storage Manager, the use of the edge storage quota is optimized by migrating content files to only those edge locations where the content is frequently requested. For example, edge storage in Paris will typically be populated with different files than edge storage in New York, since the top 10 songs requested in Paris will be different from the top 10 songs that users are requesting in New York. Smart Storage Manager is especially useful for companies that have a large volume of streaming and downloadable content, but not all of it is equally popular: The typical case is that 20% of content generates 80% of traffic demand. Therefore, it makes more sense that only the most active content is migrated to the larger edge network of servers.
I like this capability because our customers want to download different sets of data in different parts of the country, said Bob Fitzpatrick, Director of Consulting Services for Sawyer Media Systems. Speederas policy-based Smart Storage Manager saves me time as I no longer have to baby-sit my files, but I still get the best delivery quality for the content that matters the most, while keeping my costs under control.
Speederas Smart Storage Manager is much more than setting policies and automatically migrating hot content to a larger edge network, said Robert Durell, Director of Streaming for BizNews24.com. It moves only the most popular content to the edge, reducing storage costs while increasing performance.
Content sites with large streaming media and downloadable files, appealing to a widely dispersed global audience, will find Smart Storage Manager ideal for their needs. This is especially true for media and entertainment companies owning massive media archives, since only a small portion of those files receive a high number of end-user requests. Systems and software companies will also benefit from the service for example, when a computer virus outbreak occurs, anti-virus and operating system vendors are deluged in a very short period of time with download requests for the latest virus data files and OS upgrades. Automatically migrating only those few highly requested files to a globally distributed set of servers provides the capacity, performance and availability that is required under these extreme load conditions.
With Smart Storage Manager, customers can slash storage and delivery costs and still get the best performance by serving only the most popular content from globally-distributed edge servers, said Ajit Gupta, president and CEO of Speedera Networks. Going forward, we will be enhancing our policy-based management capabilities, including the addition of new ways of defining policies, based on feedback from our customers.