P2P CDN for Equinix
P2P CDN networks represent an important development in the history of content delivery networks. The key to a high performance content delivery network is a large selection of globally located points of presence (PoPs). These are servers with identical copies of a website’s data on it. When an end user requests data from a website utilising the CDN, they download the data from the PoP that is geographically closest to them, reducing latency and increasing bandwidth.
By using peer-to-peer networking, a P2P CDN uses end users machines as temporary points of presence, serving data to other end users that has already been downloaded onto the machines of existing users. As such, many potential CDN customers are looking to leverage a P2P CDN to solve their data delivery needs.
P2P CDN Benefits
Now, the latest company to utilise a P2P CDN is Equinix. The datacentre and colocation service provider is utilising Edgemesh to help it cut page load times across its downloadable content library
“Once I leave the datacentre and want to distribute content via an internet service provider [ISP] my content delivery ends up being only as good as the last mile of connectivity,” said Brian Lillie, Chief Customer Officer at Equinix. “As a former CIO, I see that’s a vexing problem because I look at the apps in the datacentre and see everything is running well with consistent throughput on the datacentre local area network [LAN], no latency, no jitter, and it ends up being the last mile.”
“Traditional content delivery is too slow, too costly and too correlated. We realised we needed to change the web, democratise the CDN market and make it fast, diversified and low cost,” says Edgemesh CEO Jacob Loveless. “In 1997, when the first CDN networks were designed, the internet moved around 100 GB per day; today it’s on the order of 26,000 GB per second. We needed to rethink the way we design and scale delivery networks and build a platform that can scale into the future.”