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Never before in human history has so much content been so easy to see in so many formats and places. As a result, people are changing the way they consume media and purchase goods, and providers are changing the way those services are being delivered.

“All this content is being served via Internet Protocol (IP), and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the ones that are delivering it globally,” says Alex Kazerani, chief executive officer and co-founder of EdgeCast, one of the top three CDNs in the world.

Cache now, stream laterThe challenge for any network provider is how to scale to meet demand. Cable companies, telecommunications providers and major content companies didn’t design their infrastructures to be able to support today’s growing demand for IP-based, bandwidth-hogging content. And even if they had tried, it wouldn’t be profitable to have the capacity to cover peak demand, such as a World Cup Final, yet stay profitable the rest of the time.

It doesn’t take a global event to use up Internet bandwidth. “If we shut down CDN facilities in Europe today and our East Coast data centers delivered all the content going to Europe, we’d saturate completely the fiber cable networks underneath the Atlantic,” Kazerani points out.

CDN technology is the solution. CDNs provide a dispersed IT infrastructure that serves as local distribution centers in a content supply chain. These centers “cache” content, storing it close to viewers.

“CDNs can carry the video once to places like London or Sydney and deliver it a

million times over in each place,” Kazerani explains. “CDNs are the backbone of delivering online content. Every big, popular website depends on them.”

Because CDNs reduce the volume of content traveling over a given network, “they reduce the costs of scaling a network to meet demand, and they also improve the quality of service to end users substantially—with the resolution and glitch-free performance of video, for instance,” Kazerani observes.

Carriers around the world are building their own CDNs to make their networks perform better and are also looking to CDN as a new way to drive revenue, Kazerani adds. “CDN technology enables carriers to offer a valuable new service to their enterprise customers both rounding out the portfolio of IT services offered as well as differentiating their network services from those of their competitors,” he says.

Technology at work

Services

Dell™ Merge Centers

Dell Online Self Dispatch

Hardware

Dell PowerEdge™ R610 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors

Integrated Dell Remote Access Controllers (iDRAC)

Software

EdgeCast proprietary software

Ubuntu Linux

“Just four people essentially manage thousands of servers in our 30 locations around the world, using the management capabilities we’ve developed that leverage the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller.” James Segil, President and Co-Founder, EdgeCast Networks

Right now tens of thousands of images, videos, songs, TV

shows, games, blogs and shopping carts are just a few clicks

away. Explore them on your smartphone, tablet, laptop,

desktop PC or even TV if it’s IP-enabled.

3

The race to be the leading CDNPrivately-owned EdgeCast is the number three-ranked CDN in the world today, behind Akamai and Limelight Networks. “It’s a highly competitive and increasingly commoditized market,” says James Segil, president and co-founder at EdgeCast.

EdgeCast has been able to stand out from the crowd and differentiate its offering by devising a surprising number of ways to deliver different kinds of value to different kinds of customers.

1. EdgeCast operates its own global content delivery network, competing as a full-service CDN offering caching, streaming, application delivery, cloud storage, and computing, site delivery and analytics.

2. EdgeCast runs a software division that is responsible for building and managing third-party CDNs on telco carrier networks around the world. This technology enables telcos to compete against other CDNs such as Akamai and Limelight Networks, while avoiding costs and improving quality of service.

3. EdgeCast builds and manages private CDNs for large content companies that need better performance and more cost efficiency.

4. EdgeCast connects it all together. It has created the OpenCDN Capacity Exchange, allowing licensees to buy and sell each other’s CDN capacity.

Helping David pull down GoliathThe OpenCDN Capacity Exchange levels the playing field for the many small CDNs around the world that must compete against three large CDNs: Akamai, Limelight and Level 3. Together, those three companies control 85 percent of the CDN market—and they are not part of the OpenCDN Capacity Exchange.

“It’s very difficult for individual CDNs to be able to deliver content to every user all over the world,” Segil explains. “They would have to manage many

direct connections and deploy hardware in a capital intensive way.”

The OpenCDN Capacity Exchange eliminates that problem. “It allows disparate CDNs all over the world to exchange capacity with one another and interconnect and do so with financial terms that work for all of us,” Segil says. “OpenCDN creates a network bigger than Akamai’s, without the financial burden or capital deployment. We have the technology that enables it.”

Foundation to winEdgeCast couldn’t achieve these goals without building a competitive edge in its proprietary software and in the hardware that runs it.

“We spent a lot of time building out what is a truly optimized, high-performance and scalable technology solution,” notes Segil. “And we’re the only CDN operator/technology provider in the market who’s doing what we do. We operate our own network as well as selling technology.”

To develop its solution, EdgeCast carefully evaluated vendors in the marketplace. Companies such as Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent offered off-the-shelf CDN in a box. “It didn’t meet our performance and cost-efficiency requirements,” Segil says. “We decided we would standardize on an Intel-based computing platform.”

The team lab-tested HP, IBM, Dell, Super Micro and custom-made Intel-based servers. “When it came down to pure hardware performance and features, Dell was at the top of the list,” says Segil. “We needed a vendor that could support us globally at a moment’s notice, sending in a SWAT team to replace equipment and ship to anywhere. That narrowed the field to Dell and HP.”

Dell won on price/performance and support, Segil says. “Dell makes us feel like a big fish in a small pond,” he notes. “We’ve been impressed by how Dell

“EdgeCast software running on Dell hardware is becoming the industry standard. There are now 3 CDN operators with thousands of servers in hundreds of cities around the world running the EdgeCast/Dell CDN solution and many more to come over the next few years.” James Segil, President and Co-Founder, EdgeCast Networks

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has been a partner to us in our growth. Without Dell, our time to market would have been double, and as a new start up we needed to start driving revenue right away. That delay would have been deadly for us, so Dell really came through.”

Getting an edge globallyNow EdgeCast has thousands of Dell PowerEdge R410 and PowerEdge R610 rack servers deployed in 30 Points of Presence (POPs) all over the world. “The 1U form factor gives us density, and that’s important because data center space and power is becoming more and more expensive,” notes Segil. “We’re able to do more with less using Dell.”

EdgeCast has developed custom software technologies for routing, load balancing, caching and storage, and it deploys those capabilities on the Dell servers. “We can build many capabilities we need into software and then leverage the ability to configure a custom server with Dell, with just the right kind of compute and memory footprint,” says Segil.

Servers arrive ready to plug in. “We have recently begun to have our server racks pre-assembled and pre-tested to order at Dell Merge Centers around the world,” Segil notes. “They eliminate the need for us to manually install components and reduce the need to dispose of boxes and packing materials. A rack is ready to use just hours after it arrives, compared to the days it would take to manually configure it and get rid of packaging.”

Lean, fast supportStandardizing on Dell has also streamlined support. “We have Dell replacement parts sitting in every data center and we can swap parts in and out easily,” Segil notes. “There’s great familiarity across the company on working with Dell at every level, be it

hardware, racks, screws, software or updates. The result is a big competitive advantage because we can get servers deployed, upgraded, fixed and shipped much faster than if we were dealing with multiple vendors.”

Simplifying managementAnother gain is enhanced remote management. “Our control software has tight integration with Dell’s remote management technology so that we get a lot of feedback from the server,” Segil says. “When there is a support-related issue, we’ve built the support I.D. layer directly into the management control panel so that we can get straight to the Dell site and see status of our server, what any issue might be and the status of any parts being shipped.”

The result is easier administration. “Just four people essentially manage thousands of servers in our 30 locations around the world, using the management capabilities we’ve developed that leverage the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC),” Segil reports.

EdgeCast staff can focus on higher value projects. “Many people underestimate the complexity of having points of presence all over the world in different time zones with different co-lo vendors and IP vendors,” Segil notes. “Having a one-stop shop for servers with Dell reduces the complexity we’d face without them.”

Valuable partnership with DellThe goal is to improve performance for content companies around the world and make the Web run faster, Segil says. “Dell is a key component of our ability to make that happen. They’re a vendor to make our operator CDN hum and run smoothly and efficiently.”

Dell is also a partner, representing EdgeCast to carriers. “Telco operators want a dependable, highly efficient global supplier of CDN hardware,” Segil adds. “Dell, with a certified CDN platform from EdgeCast, is in the pole position to perform that role.”

One of the only profitable CDNs in the worldTeamwork pays. “The overall result is that EdgeCast is one of the only profitable CDNs in the world, and being able to drive performance up and get additional value per unit is key,” observes Segil. “When we get greater performance out of what we have, costs inherently go down. And Dell’s been good at helping us be competitive financially, and push the edge of the hardware. As a result, we can drive costs out of the delivery and offer a more competitive solution.”

A rising starEdgeCast was named to Deloitte’s 2011 “Technology Rising Stars” list, which recognizes fast-growing private technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies that have been in business three or four years. The list is based on percentage revenue growth from 2008 to 2010.

Behind that growth is a competitive edge. “We’re between 5 and 25 percent faster than any other CDN, depending on where in the world the test is done,” Segil points out. And the marketplace has taken notice. “We have over 4,000 customers today and are growing at a phenomenal rate,” adds Segil. “Our goal is to directly sell our own CDN, and combine with indirect buyers and telcos to be the dominant CDN technology in the world.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © February 2012. Intel and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties - express or implied - in this case study. Reference number 10010092

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