By Rachel Chalmers
A deal between Sandpiper Networks Inc and Wirebreak Entertainment will see Sandpiper providing content delivery services to production company Wirebreak, which was founded by a former president of Paramount Entertainment. While the deal is an important one for Sandpiper, it’s most significant as an indicator of the increasing importance of dynamic content to the emerging content delivery networks like Sandpiper and its rival Akamai Technologies Inc. We’re building the broadcast networks of the internet, VP of marketing Scott Yara told ComputerWire. Having a centralized server in one data center is not going to give you the scalability you need. Sandpiper now has nearly 500 servers on 25 different networks in seven countries. Akamai boasts twice the number of servers, but according to Yara, fewer services.
He explains that when Sandpiper and Akamai first started attracting customers, they were called upon to serve mostly traditional web content – images and HTML. That amounted to some hundreds of megabytes. For streaming media, it’s a whole different world, Yara said. Those get into several hundred megabytes for individual files. You’re talking about terabytes and terabytes of data. Sandpiper tackles the problem with a massively redundant storage infrastructure, using enterprise hardware from Sun Microsystems Inc and high-end RAID systems to carry the load. The company has a deal with RealNetworks Inc to support RealSystems G2, and it’s likely to announce support for Microsoft Corp’s Windows Media Technologies any day now.
That is the biggest difference between us and Akamai, he claims. It’s our intent to be a comprehensive content delivery provider. One consequence is that Sandpiper can offer dynamic content support on version 2.0 of its Footprint network. Most of our high-end sites are dynamically generated, he explains. Akamai serves the logos. But when eBay goes down, it’s not because it can’t serve the logos. It’s because it can’t serve the web pages. With support for dynamic content, Sandpiper can assemble pages without leaving its own network. It is on value-added services like streaming media, video, animation and dynamic content support that the content delivery battle will be won – or lost. Over to you, Akamai.
