Issue 10, June/July
FOCUS CONTENT DELIVERY
HULU, IPAD AND THE DATA CENTER Explosion of online video and mobile computing drives fundamental changes throughout the industry
devices, are transforming the entire content delivery food chain.
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Carriers are upgrading their networks to phantasmagoric speeds, colocation providers are out of breath, trying to keep up with rising power densities in their facilities and all eyes are on the content delivery network providers.
CDN’s ensure ensure the content gets in front of the users’ eyeballs without hick-ups and a smart colocation provider today looks at which markets CDN’s are going after and ensures it has enough capacity in those markets to accommodate them.
A content delivery network “takes a piece of content and places it out to the edge of the network where the population densities are, so it doesn’t have to re-transmit back to the origin every single time someone wants to view that piece of content,” Dave Crowley, director of global infrastructure at Limelight Networks, one of the largest CDN providers, said during a panel at a DatacenterDynamics conference in Seattle in April. “It saves the originator a lot of money by not having to own their own infrastructure to deliver that.”
Examples of originators are Facebook, Netfl ix, Sony, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Limelight builds networks and large data centers at the edge of the backbone in all the major markets, where it supplies content to what it calls the “eyeball networks,” like Comcast or Verizon, who then bring the content to viewers.
Other major CDN’s are operated by Google, Akamai, Level 3, Internap and others. Garrick Sturgill, Seattle GM for CoreLink, a colocation provider, said that while in most instances the CDN providers come to them, asking where the company has power and space available, the savvy colo providers have to follow what the CDN’s are doing. They have to ensure that all the power, space, cooling and fi ber access is available in the markets the CDN’s are targeting.
From the last-mile network provider to the colocation facility, explosion of video content online, together with smart mobile
“Our average per-user usage has gone up to about 80 Gb a month per user,” van Oppen said. “These faster pipes that people are starting to get are really driving this online video. If you pull the net-fl ow data and look at where the traffi c’s coming from, it’s coming from the CDN’s.”
MOBILE DATA CHANGES GAME FOR CDN’S AND CARRIERS
Appl’e iPad streaming YouTube content
A smart colocation provider also has to ensure they have good CDN’s in their facilities because a smart customer will ask about them. “If you’re going to own a data center, you need to be where the geeks are at … and you’ve got to be able to talk geek speak, or they don’t want to be in your data center,” Sturgill said.
“You got to have extremely good providers, like Limelight and Spectrum, that have bulletproof networks, or they don’t want to business with you.”
CDN’S DRIVE CARRIERS’ INFRASTRUCTURE DECISIONS
Carriers are watching the CDN’s when they make strategic decisions about their networks.
“One of the things we see that I think is a change from what used to be is we’re concentrating more these days on where are the CDN’s that are generating all this video traffi c,” said John van Oppen, owner of Spectrum Networks, a Washington State-based network provider.
That is something Spectrum has observed over the last one or two years, especially among customers for whom it provides upstream transport services. The percentages of traffi c these end-users get through major content delivery networks is driving the company’s interconnect decisions in a big way.
Quickly growing use of mobile devices to watch all that content is changing the network operators’ world and the world of CDN providers themselves, who have to fi gure out how to deliver content to every new device that comes out. Limelight purchased an entire company whose product identifi es the type of device requesting data from the network and customizes the stream to that device’s screen resolution, ensuring that no bandwidth is wasted. Mobile data is obviously also having a huge impact on carriers’ network infrastructure.
“We own some metro networks and service several of the large subcarriers and what we’ve seen is that in the last six months, there’s been a huge number of requests coming in to switch from T1’s, which is what most cell sites use, to fi ber-based services,” van Oppen said.
“The most ridiculous service request I’ve ever seen was (in a 30,000-person county), a request for OC-12 to one of the tower sites of a major carrier. This shows how seriously they’re taking this upgrade.”
An OC-12 line transmits at up to about 620 Mbps and T1 speed is about 1.5 Mbps. “I don’t know what they’re doing with it but they’re very serious about it and those have been signed. Another one of the carriers is asking for 100 Mb metro Ethernet to every site. This is a big change that’s being driven by these smart devices and the video.”
As services like Netfl ix and Hulu continue upgrading their platforms, amass more content and expand their viewership, growth of demand on the infrastructure food chain is not likely to ease any time soon. Moral of the story for colo providers? Watch the CDN’s. Moral of the story for carriers? Watch the CDN’s.
www.datacenterdynamics.com 15
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