CIO —
By Jim Leach
Not since Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450s has there been such a quantum leap in our ability to produce, distribute, archive and retrieve content.
Movable type made it possible for books and newspapers that once were handwritten and available only to a few monarchs and monks to be mass produced and distributed broadly and inexpensively. Today, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and millions of websites are causing a similar shift in our production and consumption of media that includes text, audio, video and graphics.
Technology is enabling “content for the common man,” and business models are emerging to allow people to write their blogs, download podcasts and view video feeds on demand. Traditional IT strategies based on telecommunications, servers, storage and cybersecurity need to be reworked to support these new business strategies.
It’s Time to Replace Your Old CDN
IT professionals and some dotcom investors probably know of content delivery networks, or CDNs, which emerged in the dotcom boom to help website graphics download faster. Investors flocked to CDN companies such as Akamai and Sandpiper, and stock prices soared. As we all know, the dotcom boom turned into a bust and most CDN companies closed up shop, filed for bankruptcy or were purchased.
But the CDN concept was a good one. CDNs connected hundreds of servers and storage devices over the Internet. A website’s graphics-heavy content was stored on those servers. When a user in, say, London opened a website running on a server in Los Angeles, the text downloaded from L.A., but the graphics downloaded from a CDN server closest to the user in the United Kingdom. Smart software kept the whole CDN system running by providing load balancing and backup between all the servers as well as traffic management, so the content loads from the closest point to the user and there is synchronization between all the data. The end result was a faster, better website.
The problem was that these early CDNs made sense financially only for huge, graphics-intensive sites like Amazon, eBay and Victoria’s Secret. You could afford a CDN only if you were a big player. In this new era of content for the common man, we need to update the CDN model. It’s time for the content delivery network to become the media distribution utility.
Why You Need a New Acronym: CDN Becomes the MDU
The last thing the information technology industry needs is another TLA (three letter acronym), but let’s take a moment to break down the traditional CDN and discuss the need for an MDU.
