Ensure Highly Reliable First Mile Connectivity with Akamai Direct Connect

As linear OTT video services become mainstream, many broadcasters and online video distributors are increasingly looking for new ways to enhance service reliability. Many who manage their own origin infrastructures within a datacenter environment are seeking added assurance for ingest of their linear streams.

Akamai sat down with several large online video distributors to better understand their requirements, and captured the following:

• The desire to replicate private connectivity they have on traditional linear business in order to guarantee their content gets to Akamai reliably, avoiding any potential first mile issues.

• In parts of the world where transit costs are high, utilizing private connectivity can help reduce the cost of transit over the first mile to improve delivery economics.

• Help large video aggregators create common architectures across several providers

Introducing Akamai Direct Connect

 Akamai recently announced a new Direct Connect service, which opens the Akamai Edge network to private connections from our customers. These connections will provide customers a highly reliable entry point into the Akamai Edge. Akamai Direct Connect enables video distributors to achieve high performance, secure and cost effective first-mile transit for their linear video.

How the Service Works

Private connectivity is established between customer routers and Akamai within select data centers, using 10GbE connections. To ensure resiliency Akamai recommends a minimum of two diverse connections within a metro and for enhanced availability, connectivity should be replicated in an alternate metro.

Once the content has been received by Akamai routers, the service ensures that redundant paths to Akamai entry points or caching servers are available within the Akamai backbone network. The service has been designed to ensure there are no single points of failure; the Akamai Direct Connect service provides redundancy from the datacenter to Akamai core routers, within the metro where we receive content, and across a broad geo-region. This ensures that Akamai will be able to deliver the content anywhere once received.   

Akamai plans to roll out the service across major metros in the US, EMEA and APJ. Akamai Direct Connect can be combined with Akamai’s Live Origin service Media Services Live and video streaming service Adaptive Media Delivery. To view the product announcement, click here.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Alex Balford. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/xsgYxB9NkzM/ensure-highly-reliable-first-mile-connectivity-with-akamai-direct-connect.html