Lydia Leong

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Lydia Leong header image 4

Next round, Akamai vs. Limelight

April 27th, 2009 · No Comments

In CDN news this past weekend, a judge has overturned the jury verdict in the Akamai vs. Limelight patent infringement case. Akamai has said it intends to appeal.
The judge cited Muniauction v. Thomson Corp. as the precedent for a judgement of law, which basically says that if you have a method claim in a patent [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Who is Distribution Cloud?

February 8th, 2009 · No Comments

Matthew Sacks has blogged Keynote performance test results for Akamai via Distribution Cloud.
There are other Akamai resellers out there, but Distribution Cloud posts its prices publicly, starting at 50 GB for $150 per month ($3/GB), and going up to 1 TB for $2,200/month ($2.20/GB), with storage at $15/GB. That’s 10x the cost of Limelight [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Pricing transparency and CDNs

December 22nd, 2008 · 3 Comments

It is possible that I am going to turn out to be mildly wrong about something. I predicted that neither Amazon’s CloudFront CDN nor the comparable Rackspace/Limelight offering (Mosso Cloud Files) would really impact the mainstream CDN market. I am no longer as certain that’s going to be the case, as it appears that behavioral [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Amazon’s CloudFront CDN

November 18th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Amazon’s previously-announced CDN service is now live. It’s called CloudFront. It was announced on the Amazon Web Services blog, and discussed in a blog post by Amazon’s CTO. The RightScale blog has a deeper look, too.
How CloudFront Works
Basically, to use the CloudFront CDN, you drop your static objects (your static HTML, images, JavaScript libraries, etc.) [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Akamai expands its advertising solutions

October 21st, 2008 · No Comments

Akamai made an advertising-related announcement today, introducing something it calls Advertising Decision Solutions, and stating that it has agreed to aquire acerno for $95 million in cash.
acerno (which seems to belong to the e.e. cummings school of brand naming) is a small retailer-focused advertising network, but the reason that Akamai acquired it is that they [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Industry

Assessing CDN performance

October 15th, 2008 · No Comments

This is the fourth and probably final post in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study. The three previous posts covered measurement, the blind spots, and availability. This post wraps up with some conclusions.
The bottom line: The Microsoft study is very interesting reading, but it doesn’t provide any useful information about CDN performance in the [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Availability and the Microsoft CDN study

October 15th, 2008 · No Comments

This post is the third in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study. My first post examined what was measured, and the second post looked at the blind spots created by the vantage-point discovery method they used. This time, I want to look at the availability and maintenance claims made by the study.
CDNs are inherently [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Blind spots in the Microsoft CDN study

October 15th, 2008 · No Comments

This post is the second in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study comparing Akamai and Limelight. The first post discusses measurement: what the study does and doesn’t look at. Now, I want to build on that foundation to explain what the study misses.
In the meantime, Akamai has responded publicly. One of the points raised [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

What the Microsoft CDN study measures

October 13th, 2008 · No Comments

Cheng Huang et.al.’s Microsoft Research and NYU collaboration on a study entitled Measuring and Evaluating Large-Scale CDNs is worth a closer look. This is the first of what I expect will be a series of posts that aims to explain what was studied and what it means.
The study charts the Akamai and Limelight CDNs, and [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure