Content Delivery Network Provider Updates in 2019

Content delivery network provider updates have come thick and fast at the beginning of this year as content delivery network providers have sought to cement their position as industry leaders during the first few months of 2019.

We’ll take a look at some of the content delivery network provider updates that have been making news in 2019 to see how the developments will affect CDN customers and the wider content delivery network industry.

 

Fastly Partners with Microsoft to Power Data Analytics at the Edge with Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

The first of 2019’s content delivery network provider updates that we’ll look at involves Fastly. Fastly are a leading content delivery network provider with a blisteringly fast network. Their CDN was developed with high speed solid state hard drives (SSDs), Content Delivery Network Provider Updates in 2019providing a highly beneficial unique selling point. Most CDNs have traditional utilised standard platter hard drives for their points of presence. However, Fastly’s SSDs are much fast, with lower seek times which helps improve overall content delivery network speeds. This USP has seen the content delivery network provider go from strength to strength, with high profile clients such as Imgur, Condé Nast, Lonely Planet, The Guardian, Wired, Vox Media and Airbnb.

Now, Fastly are teaming up with Microsoft to integrate Fastly’s superior edge cloud platform with Microsoft’s Azure services, including Azure Data Explorer, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Event Grid. The reason for this partnership is to create a highly powerful, data analytics solution that will operate in near real time. The solution is already being used by global businesses like Taboola, and will ultimately empower companies to improve the accuracy and speed of business decision making by leveraging big data to optimise product performance and deliver high performance and exceptional end user experiences. Taboola generates 22 billion records of edge delivery data logs per day and needed a way to quickly, simply, and cost-effectively analyse its data for optimal service performance and content recommendations. By using Fastly’s platform to stream content access logs in real time directly into Azure Blob Storage and then ingest that data into Azure Data Explorer automatically, Taboola estimates significant savings of developer hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to what it had previously implmented.

The partnership between Fastly and Microsoft Azure will allow companies to collect data from the edge and pair that with other insights from their analytics and business intelligence tools in a central, integrated platform. This will allow their clients to instantly identify data trends and patterns at scale to make the business decisions that are best for their clients.

Unlike traditional edge solutions, Fastly provides 100 percent of logs in real-time from the network edge, allowing businesses to monitor site performance and troubleshoot issues as they happen. In partnering with Microsoft, Fastly integrates its real-time data logging capabilities for automatic ingestion and analysis of application and engagement performance.

“Azure Data Explorer, together with Fastly’s real-time logging, outperforms our previous solution with a faster update time and an intuitive interactive interface. Plus, it was so simple that we were up and running in a week, ingesting and analyzing 17 TB of data per day,” remarked Ariel Pisetzky, VP Information Technology at Taboola. “Our team was even able to instantly identify a problematic latency issue impacting the speed at which content was being served to customers and rectify the issue in real-time. In a time where speed of reaction and innovation is paramount to user experience, this capacity is indispensable.”

“With Azure Data Explorer, engineers can instantly identify trends, patterns, or anomalies from their ever-growing and changing data. Joining forces with Fastly, we can provide innovative organizations with a solution to deeply understand across their edge workloads,” says Daniel Yu, Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. “Microsoft and Fastly share the same principles of speed, scalability, and flexibility, so we believe the integration of our technologies will provide a unique solution for our customers.”

“Fastly delivers more than a three million log events per second, empowering our customers to easily view their traffic, understand their site health, and make the changes they need as quickly as possible,” explained Dana Wolf, SVP of Product and Marketing at Fastly. “To this end, we embrace and integrate with a multitude of central cloud platforms. This partnership and the integrations we’re building with Microsoft are another investment in support of our customer-first philosophy, empowering businesses to get the most value out of their operations at the edge.”

 

Limelight Networks Plays Key Communications Role at CERN Physics Research Centre

The second of our content delivery network provider updates for early 2019 comes from Limelight Networks, one of the biggest players in the content delivery network industry. Limelight Networks have been specialising in CDN services since 2001, making them veterans in the industry. As a testament to their high quality content delivery network offering, they have big name customers including AMC Networks, AutoTrader, Allianz, the BBC, Carrefour, Cigna, Napster, NTT Docomo, Sygic, Marvel and Kaspersky.

In a highly lucrative move for the company’s reputation, Limelight Networks have announced that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is using Limelight’s content delivery network to live stream important scientific discoveries to thousands of physicists and engineers located all around the world.

Content Delivery Network Provider Updates in 2019This is a great development for the CDN provider, as CERN is a globally important physic laboratory, garnered worldwide attention for the experiments taking place there, especially those involving the large hadron collider (LHC). The facility is home to highly sophisticated equipment and some of the world’s greatest physics minds. With a huge amount of data being generated every day, a high performance global CDN is important in order to ensure remote scientists are able to access data to help speed up research analysis. Furthermore, CERN regularly uses one of its 260 onsite conference rooms to broadcast discoveries to the general public, another area with a high performance CDN can help.

Choosing Limelight Networks would have been an easy decision for CERN. They have servers located all over the world and they regularly deliver live streams to their existing clients by intelligently using the fastest possible server at any given time. Doing this reduces bottlenecks and delivers the best possible experiences for viewers. This will ensure that CERN events are scalable, available and accessible everywhere. As a result, viewers worldwide can tune into any live webcast, such as the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery. This CERN webcast was live streamed via Limelight to more than 50,000 simultaneous viewers and almost a million viewers on demand.

“When CERN makes a major announcement, we use Limelight to make sure information is flawlessly live streamed in real-time and to handle traffic spikes along the way. Limelight’s team of engineers is on hand to join events and are available to us 24×7 to ensure everything runs smoothly,” said Marek Domaracky, Webcast Service Manager in CERN’s IT Department.

“We’re honored to help CERN deliver on its mission of communicating knowledge within the science community and with the public at large,” said Emma Whitmore, Head of Account Management, EMEA at Limelight. “Our CDN is helping to unite people from all over the world to push the frontiers of science for the benefit of all.”

 

Western Digital Expands NVMe-based Data Centres, Enabling Next-Gen Infrastructure from Edge-to-Core

The final of out content delivery network provider updates for early 2019 comes not from a CDN provider, but from Western Digital, a manufacturer of computer storage. They have announced two new additions to its large portfolio of NVMe-based systems, platforms, SSDs, and memory drives for data centre and cloud customers. These data storage devices are ultra high speed, allowing data to be retrieved quickly from the servers that they are used in. For content delivery network providers, this is great news. If their points of presence (PoPs) take advantage of this hardware, seek times can be reduced, resulting in fewer bottlenecks.

“For our cloud and hyperscale customers, performance, economics, and endurance at scale are paramount,” said Eyal Bek, vice president, data center and client computing devices at Western Digital. “The Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD and Western Digital CL SN720 SSD, both of which leverage our internally developed SSD architectures and 3D NAND, can help our customers step up from SATA to NVMe performance as they position their data centers for the future.”

“Our strong partnership with Western Digital brings compelling flash performance and cost innovations to the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure industry,” said Lee Caswell, vice president Products, Storage and Availability at VMware. “The combination of new Western Digital NVMe products, optimized for cloud and software-defined storage applications, with the award-winning VMware vSAN™ software can improve TCO and productivity for customers building out modern infrastructure.”

 

Content Delivery Network Provider Updates for Early 2019 Overview

With the content delivery network provider updates we’ve seen so far this year, it is clear that many developments are taking place that will ensure the CDN market stays highly competitive whilst providers customers and potential CDN customers alike with plenty of reasons to leverage a high performance content delivery network. From the development of exciting new hardware to partnerships that will see CDN speed and capacity increase, these content delivery network provider updates show that now is one of the best times to search for your ideal CDN provider.