Caching gear at the heart of rock 'n' roll

Hard Rock Cafe looking forward to Cisco’s combo caching-routing wares.

While Hard Rock Cafe customers might enjoy watching music videos while eating their burgers, few probably care how the digital content they're watching got there. But Rob Conti does.

As IT director for Hard Rock Cafe International, Conti needs to make sure his company's 90 locations receive the latest music-video content. To do this, Hard Rock deployed Cisco's Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) gear to its sites, letting videos be downloaded overnight to a Cisco caching device to be played locally during business hours at all Hard Rock Cafes, casinos and hotels around the world.

"This [ECDN] technology allows our music-video experience to remain current with industry trends," Conti says. The company uses products such as Cisco's Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) software to manage and schedule the pushing of content, and Content Distribution Manager and Content Engine devices send, receive and cache the data.

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While Hard Rock Cafe customers might enjoy watching music videos while eating their burgers, few probably care how the digital content they're watching got there. But Rob Conti does.

As IT director for Hard Rock Cafe International, Conti needs to make sure his company's 90 locations receive the latest music-video content. To do this, Hard Rock deployed Cisco's Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) gear to its sites, letting videos be downloaded overnight to a Cisco caching device to be played locally during business hours at all Hard Rock Cafes, casinos and hotels around the world.

"This [ECDN] technology allows our music-video experience to remain current with industry trends," Conti says. The company uses products such as Cisco's Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) software to manage and schedule the pushing of content, and Content Distribution Manager and Content Engine devices send, receive and cache the data.

"It is very challenging to distribute any content over 128K bit/sec links [which the company uses to connect the remote sites] while balancing 10 to 15 centralized applications on these same links," Conti adds. "We [push out content] three times throughout the day. A Hard Rock business is operating all hours of the day somewhere in the world; this scheduling [distribution] is vital to our network and application stability."

To increase efficiency and streamline management, Conti says he is looking into combining caching with WAN routing at Hard Rock locations. Cisco is looking to make that possible as well.

Sneak preview

Unofficially announced at Cisco's analyst conference this month, a new content module soon will be available that will fit into a single slot on Cisco routers, letting content be pushed from a central site over a WAN to a 20G or 40G byte SCSI hard drive on the modules. The modules are aimed at letting customers combine two boxes into one at remote sites, which could reduce the number of devices that customers have to manage, save on power consumption and wiring rack space.

"Less equipment to manage on our edges is a huge value to us," Conti says.

In addition to content caching and streaming, the module can provide HTTP caching for local access to frequently used Web sites, keeping loads of traffic off the backbone.

The Content Engine Network Module uses its own self-contained processor and RAM, so router performance is unaffected, the company says. The module communicates with the router via an internal Fast Ethernet interface. An IOS software upgrade to the router also lets the module be managed along with the router, and other service modules on the box through a single command-line interface. The device also can work with ACNS software and hardware (such as the Content Distribution Manager) for scheduling delivery of content over a WAN.

Cisco's ECDN gear competes with products such as F5 Networks' BigIP caching and content devices. The Content Engine Network Module with a 20G-byte hard drive is available now for $3,900, and a 40G-byte version costs $4,500.

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