Blue Coat unveils CacheFlow 5000 appliance for telecom service providers

 

Blue Coat Systems announced its Blue Coat CacheFlow 5000
appliance, which delivers significant performance and capacity more than three
times greater throughput and cache storage compared to the previous version in
the same compact, 4U footprint.

 

The new CacheFlow appliance includes IPv6 support to
address the advanced networking requirements of large service provider
customers. This performance improvement comes at a time when the increasing
amount of rich Web 2.0 content, especially videos and large files, is severely
straining service provider networks, making it challenging to both provide a
top quality user experience and contain bandwidth costs.

 

Service providers are hard pressed to keep up with their
customers’ staggering demand for Web video, particularly in countries where
international bandwidth is expensive and where much of the popular Internet
content is hosted outside the country in which the provider operates,” said
Melanie Posey, research vice president, Hosting & Managed Network Services,
IDC.

 

Demand for bandwidth and pressure on service provider
networks will expand exponentially as the growing ranks of Internet users
worldwide rely on this medium to deliver more and more of the video they
consume. As this happens, service providers will need intelligent, high
capacity Web caching to support more localized content delivery, resulting in
international bandwidth cost savings, improved traffic management, and better
quality of experience for end users,” Posey added.

 

Globally, online users watched nearly 140 billion videos
according to a comScore Video Metrix report from earlier this year. Despite the
broad popularity of Web video, today individual online viewing in the U.S.
amounts to an average of 22 minutes per week.

 

Over the next ten years, per-person U.S. Web video
watching is expected to increase more than five-fold to an average of two hours
per day.

 

The initial CacheFlow 5000 appliance, which was released
in March 2010, leveraged Blue Coat’s 15 years of experience in caching and
incorporated a new generation of caching intelligence. This intelligent caching
was designed to address the new wave of rich, dynamic Web 2.0 content, which
previously had been difficult or impossible to cache.

 

Deployed in nearly 50 service provider networks around
the world today, the appliance has achieved on average 40-50 percent bandwidth
savings on general Web traffic, facilitating a rapid return on investment,
typically 12 months.

 

In addition, the solution substantially improves user
experience, in many cases accelerating download speeds ten-fold for large
objects, such as Web video.  

 

This new release of the CacheFlow 5000 appliance adds a
significant performance and capacity boost to the intelligent caching of the
solution. The additional performance is derived from new 64-bit software and
hardware improvements. The new CacheFlow appliance also adds an option for
10GigE Fiber, in addition to existing copper, to support high-speed network
interfaces.

 

One of the key differentiators of the CacheFlow solution
is the Blue Coat CachePulse cloud service which delivers on-the-fly caching
rule and instruction updates to deployed CacheFlow appliances to provide
sustained high bandwidth savings.

 

The CachePulse service leverages a complete feedback loop
to know how the Web is changing and to identify shifts in how popular sites are
delivering content, as well as to include optimizations for new and emerging
websites.

The CachePulse service has already proven itself
invaluable for responding and adapting to changes in popular sites like
YouTube, DailyMotion, RapidShare and FileServe when those websites or their
techniques for delivering content are modified. CachePulse is included at no
additional charge as part of standard support for the CacheFlow
appliance. 

 

The new CacheFlow 5000 appliance represents a tremendous
leap in performance for Web content caching and can dramatically improve the
service provider’s ability to keep up with the unrelenting demand for Web video
while changing its economics,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and
senior vice president, Blue Coat Systems.

 

Blue Coat Systems recently announced that Ajman
University of Science and Technology (AUST), a private institution of higher
education in the United Arab Emirates, has deployed
Blue Coat ProxySG and PacketShaper appliances to accelerate the delivery of
important content and applications while protecting against Web-based
threats. 

 

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]