A Peak at the Edge: Akamai Sets New Traffic Benchmark
Last week Akamai reached a significant milestone when traffic on our intelligent edge platform exceeded the threshold of 100 Tbps (terabits per second) for the first time in our history, peaking at 106 Tbps. To put that volume of traffic into context, delivering 106 terabits per second is roughly the same as downloading 3,300 two-hour HD movies every second, or nearly 12 million an hour.
A big driver of the new record peak was a much-anticipated update to a very popular video game. And while the game was a major contributor, it’s important to note the staggering amount of other content and data delivered at the same time: streaming video (including live sports), music, e-commerce transactions, financial services, banking, software patches, healthcare information, automobile software updates; the list goes on and on.
What makes Akamai unique is the ability of our edge platform to support individual streaming events at tremendous scale – whether it’s a major sports tournament viewed by millions, game downloads or the final episode of a popular series – while simultaneously delivering the same high-quality performance for thousands of other customers conducting business on our network. We take enormous pride in delivering some of the largest online events the world has seen. But what’s truly impressive has been our ability to do this without impacting the performance we provided for other customers.
It was just 2008 when we marveled that peak traffic on Akamai crossed the 1 Tbps mark. Now, hardly a decade later, we’re talking about a peak two orders of magnitude greater –Â on a platform that delivers traffic reaching peaks of 50 Tbps every day. That said, we still feel like we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible and are already hard at work planning for the next order of magnitude beyond this one.
Adam Karon is Executive Vice President and GM, Media and Carrier, at Akamai.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Adam Karon. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/y-u-TVHy6oQ/a-peak-at-the-edge-akamai-sets-new-traffic-benchmark.html
