Gear6 Solution Brief: Video Content Delivery

Introduction

The demand for video content delivery over the internet has exploded exponentially in recent years. Witness the success of consumer video sharing sites such as YouTube and others. Content delivery for Video on Download (or Video on Demand as the case may be) is best modeled as the “Long Tail” – a bar chart with frequency of access (representing number of user downloads) on the y-axis and content popularity on the x-axis, well demonstrated by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. This pattern of access, which is the typical “demand curve” for the content rental and purchase market, has a short “head” representing the high demand for the latest videos followed by a large elongated asymptotic “tail” representing demand for everything else in the large library of video content.

The Challenges

Video delivery has a distinct I/O pattern involving up to millions of files driven largely by user-generated demand, including rapid spikes in popularity. This presents a set of challenges that most disk storage systems cannot adequately fulfill.

• Ability to serve a large number of concurrent video download streams to thousands of end-user clients
• Ability to serve a large number of concurrent video download streams from different points in the same file representing random and mixed use
• Disk storage systems cannot handle very low latency requirements that VOD applications demand, since disks have high built-in seek and access time latencies
• Achieving a desired throughput and latency thresholds with a disk based storage system requires replicating content to several storage systems resulting in excessive over-provisioning and low utilization rates

Gear6 Solution for the Video Content Delivery Market

Gear6’s high performance caching appliance can serve all popular content representing the revenue rich “head” and also a portion of the revenue producing “tail” of the “Long Tail” from a very large ultra low latency memory-based cache.

• Gear6 caching appliances serve video files to clients in parallel eliminating disk contention for hundreds to thousands of concurrent video download streams
• Efficient caching algorithms simplifies video content management and delivery, avoiding costly content replication and time-consuming scripting solutions
• The Gear6 caching appliance fits non-disruptively into any file based storage infrastructure without requiring any changes to existing storage servers or the storage clients
• For read-only VOD applications, expect dramatic acceleration and greatly increased concurrent download capacity from a single caching appliance

Related Links

• Scaling Content Delivery for IPTV and WebTV
• Gear6 Video: Surviving the Data Deluge