Locally Cache YouTube and Facebook to Cut Internet Congestion
By Steve Inman
Since video now consumes close to 50% of most organization’s internet pipes, we’ve seen rising demand from our Customers for a cost-effective and operationally-effective way to cache video locally.
Originally we found a firm called Stratacache with a product called SuperLumin, which promises a purpose built solution specifically for social media; and moreover Facebook and You Tube. Their technology promises a unique ability to re-serve content locally even though the requested address of the Akamai servers hosting the content changes with every request. According to SuperLumin, this is a capability beyond what a traditional web object cache can perform.
A few months ago, we ran this notion by our friends and business partners at Exinda who were working on releasing a “single-sided” cache capability on their line of traffic shaping/WAN optimization appliances (Exinda calls it UPM: Unified Performance Managment). They assured us their product development also addressed the challenges of changing request addresses and could cache and deliver YouTube and Facebook locally as well.
That brings us to today when Exinda has made its single-sided cache generally available. We are very excited to bring this capability to our legacy EDU Customers who have converted recently to the Exinda platform. By all means they are hammered with video traffic. However we’re equally enthused about single-sided cache with our enterprise accounts. Many of them have also migrated from older PacketShapers that were providing visibility and shaping functionality on WAN links in addition to their internet feeds. Now with Exinda, we can provide a single device that provides visbility, shaping, WAN acceleration/optimization and a single-sided cache.
It’a a lot of fun solving real business problems that make folks’ lives better and save money. We are fortunate to have great, forward thinking partners like Exinda to go to market with. Take a look at the vdeo below. Its not a complicated concept, but the postive impact on end user experience, network congestion, and IT budgets is signifcant.
