Content Delivery Network Developments for October
Content delivery network developments have been coming thick and fast this October, with many new technologies being developed by content delivery network providers around the globe. These content delivery networks developments are vital for CDN providers to meet global demand for data delivery. Here we’ll run through the most exciting content delivery network news for the month.
Google to Deploy Their First Private Trans-Atlantic Subsea Cable
One of the most important content delivery network developments for October comes from Google. They have announced that they will be constructing a private trans-atlantic subsea cable to help boost global internet speeds and thus provide a real benefit to CDN providers and end users.
Speaking about the development and its justifications, Jayne Stowell, Strategic Negotiator at Google pointed out their current infrastructure success and why the deep sea cable is so vital for the company’s growth:
“This year, we’ve announced major expansions to our global cloud infrastructure, which helps us provide high quality services to our customers. We introduced new cloud regions in the Netherlands, Montreal, Finland, and opening just yesterday, Los Angeles. We invested in three consortium subsea cables–Havfrue, HK-G, and JGA-S. And we we became the first major non-telecom company to build a private intercontinental cable with our investment in the Curie cable.”
Stowell continued, “today, we’re announcing our newest private subsea cable project: Dunant. This cable crosses the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to the French Atlantic coast, and will expand our network–already the world’s largest–to help us better serve our users and customers. The Dunant cable is expected to become available in late 2020.”
“Dunant adds network capacity across the Atlantic, supplementing one of the busiest routes on the internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud. We’re working with TE SubCom to design, manufacture and lay the cable for Dunant, which will bring well-provisioned, high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly secure cloud connections between the U.S. and Europe.”
“In keeping with the theme we established with Curie, Dunant is also named after an influential innovator, Henri Dunant, the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross. Like Curie and Dunant, future Google private cables will follow a similar alphabetic theme.”
Ericsson’s UDN to be Used by Mode and Versa
Ericsson has created a leading reputation with their CDN, which it calls their Unified Delivery Network. And this reputation comes with good reason. Their UDN is a high performance global network that is favour by many large companies around the world.
Now, in another in a series of content delivery network developments, the Ericsson UDN will be used by the San Francisco-based networking startup Mode to deliver private connectivity and SD-WAN (software-defined networking in a wide area network) services enabled by Versa Networks, which have been validated as a solution that’s interoperable with Mode.
“We’ve partnered with Ericsson who has a large backbone network,” said Mode CEO Paul Dawes. “UDN is comprised of partnerships with 90 service providers, and those basically provide the underlying capacity and connectivity to their access network.”
He said UDN is designed as an edge compute network comprised of data centers that are connected by private fiber. “We run a virtual overlay network on top of that framework, using cool technology developed out of Cornell. We are not an SD-WAN provider. We complement any SD-WAN deployment.”
In addition to this, Atchison Frazer, Versa’s head of marketing, said, “We look forward to partnering with Mode to offer a joint cloud-native, software-defined private connectivity solution to augment legacy global WAN infrastructures for our secure SD-WAN customers.”
Aryaka is an SD-WAN vendor that differentiates itself with its global private network. Asked if Mode’s network-as-a-service combined with SD-WAN was a similar offering to Aryaka’s, Dawes said, “I would say that when we look at the value proposition, Aryaka is probably the closest to what we’re doing that incorporates a private backbone network.”
But he tempered that by saying, “Aryaka is built on a traditional telco core network. We are just running blade servers connected by Layer 2 fiber. The economics are quite a bit different. We provide enterprises with private connectivity for 15 to 20 percent of the cost of MPLS.”
Akamai Content Delivery Network Launches Broadcaster Video Delivery Cloud Solutions
The Akamai CDN is constantly release content delivery network developments to help improve services for their customers. This is vital, because Akamai is one of the world’s largest content delivery network providers with big name customers including Autodesk, Audi, Best Buy, BNP Paribas, Fiat, IBM and MSN.
Many of Akamai’s most important customers rely heavily on video. This is unsurprising, given just how popular high definition video has become, not just as a means to convey marketing information online, but also through the distribution of leading video content such as award winning movies and TV shows.
As such, Akamai has developed two new innovation cloud solution for broadcaster video. These services are Akamai Cloud Wrapper and Akamai Direct Connect.
Cloud Wrapper aims to eliminate the problems faced by broadcasters and OTT services when migrating content to cloud platforms. Too many streaming requests being made on content at the origin can lead to poor performance, and broadcasters need to pay egress fees for content that’s served from the origin and not the edge. Akamai’s solution stores content outside the cloud to reduce user requests to the origin.
Akamai Direct Connect, on the other hand, aims to solve first mile problems that occur when content owners deliver video over the internet to the Akamai Edge. This reliance on the 
public internet reduces efficiency and increases transit costs. Direct Connect fixes this by connecting the cloud storage with Akamai Edge. The offering increases reliability and lowers costs, according to Akamai.
“Through innovative solutions such as Cloud Wrapper and Direct Connect, Akamai is striving to stay well ahead of the adoption curve,” says Campbell Foster, vice president of media industry and product marketing at Akamai. “Our customers’ streaming services are evolving into increasingly significant parts of their business operations, and Akamai is committed to helping them fully realize the vital role of the Akamai Edge in their efforts.”
Azure Content Delivery Network is Now Available Generally
Another of the many content delivery network developments for October is the announcement that Microsoft is launching their Azure CDN for general availability, allowing customers to make use of the global Microsoft content delivery network.
With Azure CDN, customers can benefit from deep integration with other services like Web Apps, Media Services, and Storage. The Azure CDN is available in 62 locations around the world, providing high performance no matter where on the planet end users are.
Maxwell Gattuso, program manager, Azure Networking, said in the announcement blog post:
Azure CDN’s multi-CDN ecosystem enables you to manage CDN as an Azure resource; on demand and API driven. This flexibility along with three strong CDN infrastructures enables you to easily add multi-CDN as part of your content delivery story. Using these CDN solutions on their own, side-by-side in a multi-CDN solution or tiering them to maximize reliability, offload and performance, you can focus on optimizing your delivery to suit your business needs.
October’s Content Delivery Network Developments Round Up
As you can see, October has been another busy month for content delivery network developments. From the construction of a high performance subsea cable to the partnering of global content delivery network providers with companies to help improve the end user experience for customers, the CDN industry growth that has been taking past over the last few years shows no sign of slowing down.