Creating a CDN Architecture for Multi-Screen Delivery
Content delivery networks (CDNs) need to stream to an increasingly fractured market, representing a growing number of devices, formats, and codecs. At the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London, Stef van der Ziel, CEO of the CDN StreamZilla, told how his company does it.
"One of the most important things is that customers need multi-screen support, right? There's no single standard for video delivery, so you need to support them all," began van der Ziel.
Efficiency is crucial to StreamZilla's success, and van der Ziel told how his company achieves it.
"We have what is called a multi-vendor strategy, which means that if customers want to use alternative technologies like Internet Information Server or QuickTime Streaming Server, that should be possible, as well. But the challenge is that you have to run those services in your CDN and you don't want to have a server per service, because that's not efficient, right?
"Let's assume that you have an information server and Flash Media Server and Wowza Media Server running in your CDN each on a separate server. You need a lot of servers and they will always be underutilized. We know that a lot of CDNs do that in that way, or, alternatively, they use virtualization. So they run multiple OSs on a single box and run applications in those virtualized environments, but that kills the performance, in general. Virtualization can take off 25 percent of the performance of a box, but also can make the server less stable," explained van der Ziel.
To achieve efficiency, StreamZilla had to create its own solution.
So what we did is parallelization, which is something we invented over ten years ago," said van der Ziel. "We natively run those applications side-by-side on a single server, and the server can either be a hardware server or a virtual server or a cloud-based server -- or any combination of that."
For more on CDN architecture, including advice from StreamUK and Telefónica, watch the video below.
CDN Architectures for Multi-Screen Delivery
Moderator: Charlie Good, CTO, Wowza Media Systems, Inc
Brian Weeks, Video Stream Sales Engineer, Mirror Image Internet
Stef van der Ziel, CEO, StreamZilla
Joe Bray, Chief Technical Officer, StreamUK
Morten Petersen, Product and Marketing Manager, Global Delivery Services, Telefónica
This panel discussion will focus around building effective ecosystems for any-screen delivery, exploring the technical challenges CDNs face, and evaluating solutions for architecting a CDN infrastructure that reliably delivers multiscreen content, cost-effectively. The CDN panel will share their expertise via practical case studies.
Related Articles
Europe's leading "home-grown" CDN spins off technologies into new products, including the "CDN in a Box"
31 May 2011