Akamai, Juniper Demo an Elastic CDN

Two of the industry’s bigger innovators are teaming up for the next chapter in content delivery technology. At this week’s SDN/OpenFlow World Congress, the CDN heavyweight Akamai and the routing giant Juniper are demonstrating what is described as an Elastic Content Delivery Network.

Basically, it’s a proof of concept that marries Juniper’s Contrail SDN and NFV technology with Akamai’s virtualized Aura Licensed CDN. The idea is to combine the two to dynamically scale up and down the necessary network resources to support spikes in online video content.

Stripped of the buzzwords, the idea is to allow service providers the ability to deploy more streaming and caching capacity where they need it within minutes from common resource pools of bandwidth and servers and such, just as many already do with raw computing power these days. It seems like an obvious evolution  given how pervasive the cloud and virtualization have become and how quickly SDN is gaining traction. But actually putting such a concept into practice and working out the kinks always takes rather longer than the buzz.

Just where an ECDN offering based on this demo might fit in the complicated world of content delivery, network operators, and vendors is an open question. But Akamai and Juniper both clearly want to get ahead of the curve on it.

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Categories: Content Distribution · SDN · Telecom Equipment