A global solution to a Web performance problem

When Sling Media went live with a service provider to help it deliver large files worldwide, one of its Japanese partners was skeptical. The concern was that customers wouldn’t be able to download files as fast as they could when the partner hosted the files itself.

“They spent about an hour downloading files continuously,” from the new content delivery network (CDN), says Olav Phillips, director of technical marketing for Sling Media, in Foster City, Calif. “They were amazed. They didn’t think it would work as fast as it did.”

As he told attendees at the recent Network World IT Roadmap Conference and Expo in San Francisco, the decision to go with a CDN was driven by business realities. Sling Media was simply growing too fast, at one point signing up five new international partners within seven months. (Watch the video of our interview with him from the event.)

Sling Media makes the Slingbox, a device that IP-enables a consumer’s set-top television box. Users can transfer TV signals from their cable or satellite service across the Internet and watch shows anywhere they have a broadband IP connection. On the remote end, the setup requires a piece of client software – dubbed the SlingPlayer – that runs on laptops, smart phones and other mobile devices.

Searching for a CDN

The trick was how to enable customers around the globe - the company has customers in 183 countries - to be able to download the SlingPlayer in a reasonable amount of time. Depending on the version, the code can be 40M to 70MB in size, and Sling Media comes out with new versions every two months or so.

Building its own data center infrastructure in various locations around the globe wasn’t a viable option for Phillips, who serves as the only full-time Web developer for the company. In Europe, for example, he says it may take two or three months to negotiate a bandwidth contract, and two to eight weeks to get a server. Sling Media simply didn’t have that much time, not with partners signed up in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and various countries in Asia.

The only reasonable alternative was to sign on with a CDN provider that could host its files and ensure speedy downloads in crucial locations. Phillips looked at providers including Akamai and Limelight Networks before settling on Netli.

Netli uses a concept called Virtual Data Centers (VDC) to drive its NetliOffload content caching service as well as its performance acceleration offering. VDCs are essentially Netli-owned data centers that serve up Web pages and other content on behalf of Netli clients.