CDNetworks Acquires Panther Express

CDNetworks has acquired Panther Express in a move that could signal; the start of a long-expected consolidation phase in the content delivery sector. The deal gives Korea-based CDNetworks a larger presence in the U.S., where Panther had a marquee client in the official BarackObama.com campaign site. 

CDNetworks has been the leading content delivery network in Asia, and expanded into the U.S. market in mid-2007, establishing caching sites in nine locations. It raised $96 million in private funding in late 2007 and appeared poised to make an acquisition to expand its North American presence.

CDN Roundup: Akamai, CDNetworks, EdgeCast

It’s been a busy week for the content delivery sector. Here’s a roundup:

• CDN market leader Akamai Technologies (AKAM) defied concerns about competition and pricing pressure, surpassing Wall Street expectations with a strong earnings report. “Akamai’s results show no signs of pricing disruptions, despite the crowded field,” writes Rob Powell at Telecom Ramblings. ”I don’t get the sense that they prospered at the expense of others in the sector, rather that the sector itself had a good quarter.”
• Up and coming CDN EdgeCast has had a good run of late. Last week it picked up a big reseller deal with Deutsche Telekom, and yesterday it unveiled a similar agreement with managed hosting provider NaviSite, which will use EdgeCast to supersede its in-house service. Dan Rayburn has more.  
• Network World has an update on the progress of CDNetworks, the large Korean CDN which last year launched an ambitious expansion into the US market. The company says it now has more than 120 customers in the US, and has added nodes in Australia and Brazil.

CDNs Covet Churches for Streaming Sermons

Are churches a growth market for content delivery services? Internap Network Services (INAP) thinks so. Internap has a press release this morning positioning itself as “a preferred network provider for faith-based organizations,” and highlighting several clients streaming sermons and Christian education programming.

“Faith-based organizations are moving online in rapid succession,” said Tim Sullivan, chief technology officer at Internap. “The type of content they are distributing requires very robust streaming media and connectivity solutions.”

Internap isn’t alone. The EdgeCast content delivery network is also customizing its marketing to target video and audio sermons. “EdgeCast ensures that your church’s sermons are always on the network edge, adjacent to your congregation, no matter where they are located globally,” the company says.

CDN News: Mobile CDNs, Ono, Kontiki

There’s been a number of news stories today about the content delivery business. Here’s a roundup:

• Does mobile content require specialized CDN services? Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm looks at a new software product from Dilithium Networks targeting mobile distribution, as well skepticism from CDNs that such services are needed.
• Can CDNs like Akamai and Limelight provide a roadmap for reducing network traffic used by peer-to-peer applications? Researchers at Northwestern have developed a plugin for the Azureus P2P client that identifies nearby users and seeks the shortest route to the files. The software, called Ono, assumes that two computers sent to the same node on a CDN network are close to one another. 
• ISPs and hosting companies are the target market for Aflexi, a new company that offers to aggregate CDN services from multiple providers. See coverage by Contentinople, Lydia Leong and Dan Rayburn.   

The Google CDN

So after all of last night’s drama about Google supposedly constructing an Internet “fast lane” offering preferential treatment from access providers, it turns out the company is actually building a traditional content delivery network (CDN) to cache content at ISPs. The arrangement will save bandwidth costs for many Google services, but especially for YouTube, which was specifically mentioned by Google’s Richard Whitt in his blog post last night.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the Google CDN project is gaining a higher profile just now. Last week YouTube began offering a larger number of videos in high definition (HD), which means it must deliver many millions of videos in even larger file sizes. The leading CDN providers, Akamai Technologies (AKAM) and Limelight Networks (LLNW), have long predicted that HD video would be a game changer for them, fundamentally altering the math of network capacity and shifting more content to CDNs.

CDN Roundup: Rackspace, Verizon, CloudFront

It’s been a busy week for the content delivery network (CDN) sector, as Amazon’s launch of its CloudFront has been followed by several significant developments that further expand options for CDN customers:

• Verizon (VZ) announced that it has deployed a dedicated peer-to-peer content delivery network on its infrastructure. Verizon will use technology from Velocix that can cache popular content, and then seeds the files from servers within the ISP’s network, reducing network traffic. Verizon’s approach offers interesting decisions for content providers who are currently using Akamai or Limelight but covet Verizon’s FiOS customer base. See additional coverage and analysis at Contentinople and Telecom Ramblings.
• Rackspace’s Mosso unit has launched its CDN, which allows CloudFiles customers to use Limelight Networks to deliver their files. Gartner’s Lydia Leong compared it with Amazon’s new CloudFront CDN: ”Competitively, it seems like Rackspace’s Cloud Files plus Limelight may turn out to be the stronger offering,” Leong writes. “The price of Rackspace/Limelight is slightly higher, but apparently there’s no origin retrieval charge, and Limelight has a broader footprint and therefore probably better global performance.”
• In that same post, Gartner’s Leong also provided an assessment of the impact of Amazon’s CDN. She writes: “Some people will undoubtedly excitedly hype CloudFront as a game-changer. It’s not. It’s certainly yet another step towards having ubiquitous edge delivery of all popular static content, and the prices are attractive at low to moderate volumes, but high-volume customers can and will get steeper discounts from established players with bigger footprints and a richer feature set. It’s a logical move on Amazon’s part, and a useful product that’s going to find a large audience, but it’s not going to majorly shake up the CDN industry, other than to accelerate the doom of small undifferentiated providers who were already well on their way to rolling into the fiery pit of market irrelevance and insolvency.”      

Roundup: Amazon’s CloudFront CDN

There’s been lots of coverage and analysis of Amazon’s launch of its CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Here’s a sampling of noteworthy reaction from around the web:   

• Dan Rayburn notes widespread analysis that Amazon’s entry into the CDN market is trouble for Akamai and Limelight. “This assumption could not be further from the truth and people should look at the facts of what the Amazon service is and how that compares to Akamai or Limelight,” Dan writes. ”This is a great service for smaller customers who have very specific needs but it won’t challenge any of the major CDNs for years to come.” Dan notes that Amazon is using Limelight for its own video on demand service.
• How can smaller customers use the service? Amit Agarwal offers an excellent step-by-step guide to implementing CloudFront as a CDN, complete with diagrams.
• Stacey at GigaOm notes that Amazon’s pricing may mean trouble for new CDNs whose selling point has been cheaper rates than Akamai. “With prices ranging from 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes sent out a month, to 9 cents per GB for everything over 150 TB, the service seems to undercut the pricing offered by other CDNs for small to medium sized customers,” she writes.”
• Larry Dignan at ZDNet says that pricing will have an impact. “Amazon is accelerating the commoditization of content delivery services,” Larry writes. “These services are increasingly being bundled into other higher-end offerings anyway.”

Political Sites Scale Up for Election Night Traffic

Election Night is one of the great scheduled scalability challenges. The extraordinary interest in the U.S. Presidential election is likely to translate into enormous web traffic tonight, and news sites and political blogs have had months to prepare. This is the political equivalent of the Super Bowl, and sites are scaling up to meet the challenge. Several hosting companies report increased sales of dedicated servers, and election traffic will likely be a boon to content delivery networks (CDNs).

For some sites, preparing their infrastructure has already been a lengthy process. “I’ve done a lot of stuff since January to get the site ready for Election Day, since we also had primary election traffic to worry about,” said Jeremy Bingham, who manages the back end for Daily Kos, the hugely popular political blog. “Our images are on a CDN, but the rest of the site doesn’t lend itself to caching on a CDN because of its dynamic nature.”

Hardware is part of the solution, Bingham says. “To handle the traffic better, we moved to a cluster of six quad core Xeons with 8GB RAM for webheads that all boot off a central NFS (Network File System) root, with the capability of adding more webheads as needed,” he said. Daily Kos also added two 16GB eight-core Xeons and a 6×73GB RAID-10 array for database files running a MySQL master/slave setup.

Hosting companies have reported increased demand for new hardware in recent weeks. “A few customers have ordered additional servers in order to support the expected increase in traffic over the last few weeks and for the next couple of days,” said George Karidis, CTO of SoftLayer, who said the hosting company has seen an even larger jump in orders for add-on services to help them scale. “In the past few days we have noticed an up-tick in the number of people buying ‘availability’ services like CDNLayer (a content delivery service) and load balancing. Many of these are related to ’spike’ oriented traffic like the election.”

Limelight’s CDN Pricing Gets Disruptive

Dan Rayburn at the Business of Online Video tracks pricing for content delivery services as closely as anyone. When analysts predict CDN pricing wars, Dan is usually the voice of caution, adding balance and context to the conversation. So his post this morning about the recent price cuts by Limelight Networks (LLNW) got my attention.

Limelight has been “getting a lot more aggressive” on pricing for video delivery, and telling customers that the new pricing is driven by recent infrastructure improvements that have lowered Limelight’s delivery costs. Dan had anticipated this would happen eventually, but wasn’t expecting to see it until the second quarter of 2009. He writes:

If they can cut their own costs, pass that savings onto customers in the form of lower pricing and increase their margins all at the same time, we are going to see another huge shift in pricing in this quarter. Not to mention, Limelight is going to continue to grab a lot of the new business in the market and continue their momentum. I am already starting to see some big changes in pricing this month as compared to last quarter and if Limelight continues to put pressure on some of the other providers, we’re going to see CDN pricing for video slashed over the remaining two months of the year.

Limelight’s recent momentum would have seemed unlikely back in February, when the company lost its patent infringement lawsuit with rival Akamai (AKAM). At the time, analysts questioned the company’s ability to continue operating and predicted a sale to a competitor or telco.