Replicator
So you have a large number of servers and you want assets and live streams to be available on those servers…
You could sync all assets to all servers. Easy.
That takes a lot of time. And expensive storage. It is not dynamic. Why sync unpopular assets to all servers?
You could setup permanent relays for all the live streams. Easy.
That requires a lot of inter-server traffic. It is not dynamic. Why relay unpopular streams to all servers?
You could use caching servers.
We call this PULL. You redirect a user to a cache. If the cache doesn’t have the asset, it will pull it from an origin server, cache it an serve it. The cache flushes the asset after a certain time.
But this means you cannot fully control which assets are allowed to be on which servers for which customers. You cannot manage thresholds per customer. You cannot assign resources per customer. Caching servers don’t cache streams…
So we wrote our own engine called Replicator. Todays version is extremely enhanced compared to the first rudimentary scripts we had written long time ago.
Replicator is a managed PUSH asset and live relay replication engine and is one of the core apps of the VDO-X CDN solution. It is 100% unique IP.
New assets are live on the CDN within a few minutes. Live relays as well. Replicator supports relay setup for all popular media servers and encoders, push and pull.
The CDN automatically monitors the popularity of each asset and live stream per geo region. So Replicator can immediately replicate assets and relays to the nearby delivery servers. Every distribute action is checked to exclude file transfer corruption.
Thanks to Replicator we can offer full control on which customers in a CDN have access to which server resources. We can set popularity and time-to-live thresholds per customer. We can manage and add resources on the fly, per customer. Most CDN’s don’t offer this flexibility… some are still stuck with mediocre caching or syncing techniques. Or use P2P…
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