Akamai Collaborates with Orange on NFV Initiative to Dynamically Scale CDN Capacity for Large Events

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, today announced that it has successfully completed proof-of-concept (PoC) testing at Orange, one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators. Orange demonstrated the ability of Akamai’s Aura Virtualized Licensed CDN (vLCDN) solution, integrated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) NFV Director 3.0 orchestration platform, to provide on-demand CDN scaling for live video streaming of popular events. This project continues the work of an innovation steering committee previously established by Akamai and Orange to identify areas of innovation in the field of CDN solutions.

As networks increasingly are called upon to burst capacity in support of large events, it is critical to prove how CDN capacity can be deployed and scaled, in minutes instead of months. Leveraging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Akamai’s Aura vLCDN solution is designed to enable Network Service Providers (NSPs) to run CDN services on virtualized infrastructure, providing the ability to dynamically allocate resources in real-time and cost effectively respond to rapidly changing capacity requirements such as large live events or major software downloads, among other use cases.

“NFV and SDN has the potential to scale CDN flexibly and rapidly, which is critical in supporting high volume live-events in a cost effective manner,” said Dominique Delisle, Program Director for Content Delivery Network & Services Transformation, Orange, “Our collaboration with Akamai and HPE on vCDN orchestration shows exciting promise as it proves the feasibility of achieving the rapid scalability and agility that we need.”

NSPs are seeking technology and strategies which will allow them to transition from fixed infrastructure solutions based on dedicated hardware to more open solutions that run on virtual machine (VM) environments. This model can be instrumental in reducing both the level of operator intervention and the overall cost of adding network capacity to support increased network demands – either sustained or intermittent. To meet operator requirements in this area, Akamai’s Aura vLCDN solution operates on popular NFV building blocks such as open source KVM hypervisors, VMWare ESXi, OpenStack Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and SDN solutions from leading networking vendors. Akamai has also been actively participating in industry collaboratives such as HPE’s OpenNFV program and others as a way to further assist NSPs with this transition.

“The successful collaboration with Akamai on the Orange proof-of-concept is a testament to the success of our OpenNFV program,”said Werner Schaefer, vice president, Sales & GTM, Communications Solutions Business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Akamai will play an important role in the work we are doing at OpenNFV Labs to support network operator partners such as Orange as they look to transition to an NFV-enabled framework for delivering high audience IP video and other services.”

For the proof-of-concept, Akamai’s Aura vLCDN solution ran on KVM hypervisors with HPE Helion OpenStack virtual infrastructure manager. Storage and compute resources used for CDN functions were dynamically allocated and de-allocated by the HPE NFV Director orchestrator across a network of physical machines according to the volume and type of content requested from subscribers within a given geography at a given time. This “elastic” allocation/de-allocation of resources is a key component of an elastic CDN allowing the size of the CDN to be dynamically scaled out or in according to demand. This can be accomplished either manually by network engineers, or automatically, based on certain network or resource conditions.

“Virtualization is playing a key role in CDN transformation by providing the foundation on which highly scalable operator CDN offerings can be built,” stated Mick Scully, vice president and general manager, Carrier Products, Akamai. “The ability to deploy and make available CDN capacity in minutes instead of months – as can be successfully accomplished with Akamai’s vLCDN solutions – represents a major advancement in how NSPs can offer the services their customers demand.”