9th August 2011OnApp, currently one of the world’s more progressive software providers for cloud hosting companies, yesterday announced a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) platform for its global providers. The OnApp CDN, available with immediate effect, will deliver instant global CDN capabilities for hosts, enabling them to build their own CDN without having to develop costly global CDN infrastructure.
At launch on Monday, OnApp confirmed their CDN will provide 40 Points of Presence (PoPs) across America, Europe and Asia, placing it firmly in the top five global Content Delivery Networks worldwide alongside CDN giants including Akamai and Limelight. The OnApp CDN platform supports HTTP push, HTTP pull, and streaming/live streaming of online content.
OnApp’s CEO, Ditlev Bredahl, believes the new offering will give hosts a more affordable CDN solution in a market currently “in the grip of a handful of vendors”:
“[At present] prices are outrageous at the high end of the [CDN] market, because providers have to recoup the cost of running a network of global data centres.
“With the OnApp CDN that’s no longer the case; hosts can bring CDN services to market at a much lower cost than other CDN vendors. We’re making high-end CDN functionality affordable for hosts and their customers, for the first time.”
OnApp’s new CDN arrives at a time when speed and performance of cloud-based applications are considered a barrier-to-entry for many SMEs with an interest in switching to cloud. However, according to Bredahl, this new product will directly address such issues:
“As our key customers are hosting providers to the SME market, by offering a global CDN service, our customers can improve their business offering by delivering a faster and more efficient global internet service to small and medium sized enterprises.
“This is achieved by using the server capacity reserved for cloud scalability and redundancy, which can be as much as 15% of your data centre infrastructure sitting idle, so that it becomes a source of revenue and not cost.”
Hosting companies interested in taking advantage of this new product can do so by buying into OnApp’s CDN stack, which contains a virtual edge server for each data centre and the controller software that manages the Points of Presence. Current OnApp customers can simply deploy it on their existing OnApp platform.
“When the CDN stack is in place, a host can avail of the OnApp CDN Federation, a network of hosting providers offering CDN capacity, and a marketplace through which hosts can buy and sell capacity on demand,” adds Ditlev Bredahl.
“Hosts set their own prices for CDN resources, and the marketplace displays key information about the CDN resources (Points of Presence) available, such as bandwidth, location and server specifications.
“It would be difficult for other cloud software providers to replicate our Federation model as they don’t have this breadth of partners across a global network. OnApp also owns the software that manages the POPs and the Federation marketplace. We believe we have a unique proposition and competitive advantage in offering CDN alongside our cloud platform.”
The OnApp CDN was launched yesterday at the HostingCon exhibition in San Diego, US, and the company will further promote their products at the Cloud Computing World Series in Sao Paulo, Brazil in September and at the Cloud Computing and CDN World Forum in Asia, where the company will showcase the importance of combining both their cloud and CDN products.
For more information visit www.onapp.com or register for the Cloud Computing World Forum Latin America or Cloud Computing / CDN World Forum Asia.
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