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Why Microsoft Built Its Own CDN
Microsoft announced this week that it will begin providing on-demand access to the full versions of retail video games. That means titles like BioShock (6 Ggigabytes) and Mass Effect (7 GB) can be downloaded through the Xbox Live online gaming service, which has more than 17 million members. The growth of these type of bandwidth-draining services has been a major driver in Microsoft’s decision to build its own content delivery network.
Jeff Cohen, the general manager of Microsoft’s Edge Computing Network, discussed the company’s content delivery infrastructure in his May 11 keynote at the first Content Delivery Summit. Cohen said video delivery accounted for just 10 percent of Microsoft’s content delivery in 2007, but has since grown to 40 percent, consuming as much bandwidth as the company’s “large file” downloads of software and security updates.
“The content is exploding,” Cohen said at the event, part of Streaming Media East. But the barrier to entry for the CDN market is steep. ”It takes a huge amount of capital to get into this space, even for Microsoft.”
That’s why Microsoft uses its Edge Content Network to deliver about 40 percent of the content on its network, while farming out the remaining 60 percent to existing CDN partners including Akamai (AKAM), Limelight Networks (LLNW), Level 3 (LVLT) and ChinaCache.
Streaming Media has posted full video of Cohen’s 30-minute presentation, which we’ve embedded below:
kicker here
About Rich Miller
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
V
Posted June 4th, 200920 _billion_ dns requests a second? I have doubts.
VeriSign says its DNS servers get 750,000 requests per second. So yeah, that number seems out of scope, even if its millions and not billions.
links for 2009-06-05 « Dan Creswell’s Linkblog
Posted June 5th, 2009[...] Why Microsoft Built Its Own CDN « Data Center Knowledge Cohen said video delivery accounted for just 10 percent of Microsoft’s content delivery in 2007, but has since grown to 40 percent, consuming as much bandwidth as the company’s “large file” downloads of software and security updates. (tags: cdn streaming video) [...]
New on the release of Windows 7 (it’s October 22), changes to Windows 7 Starter Edition, Xbox Live CDNs and more of what I’ve read | Coded Style
Posted June 7th, 2009[...] of interest is this article on Why Microsoft Built Its Own content delivery network (aka CDN), as Rich Miller covers the announcement that Microsoft "will begin providing on-demand access [...]
Allen
Posted June 8th, 2009Just download Abstractual or Perceus and setup something like this with OSS. As long as you can afford the bandwidth charges, Abstractual can provision and load balance it all. Free open source software is something the world needs and this kind of stuff shows off why.
750,000 requests per second for DNS is out…
Using Intel’s newest 10gbit ethernet card, Fastweb’s CloudXNS single server is capable of handling 3million requests per second.
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