NaviSite adds Conxion services to its own

Managed infrastructure provider NaviSite has been on an acquisition roll over the past few months. Recently it completed its acquisition of Conxion, getting Conxion’s content delivery technology in the process.

As a result, NaviSite is expanding its CDN offerings. Previously, NaviSite’s CDN portfolio consisted of a service called DeltaEdge. DeltaEdge recognizes changes in content so that only new content must be retrieved from origin servers. That new content is then inserted into existing pages and delivered from the edge.

With the Conxion acquisition, NaviSite’s CDN portfolio has grown. Now in addition to DeltaEdge, it is offering Conxion’s Faster Than Light (FTL) service and its Cache-on-Demand service. Both are built on Conxion’s HotRoute technology.

Unlike CDNs such as Akamai and Speedera, which have built overlay networks using thousands of edge servers, Conxion’s HotRoute technology enables content to be kept at the core. The way HotRoute works is it intelligently finds the best network path to deliver content and data in the quickest way possible.

“HotRoute works at the network level,” says Phil Simmonds, former senior director of product marketing at Conxion who now holds the same position at NaviSite. “It determines the actual location of the end user requesting content and figures out the best routes to deliver content to that end user in the quickest way.” 

FTL doesn’t use caching technology, but keeps content – such as software downloads – in a shared or dedicated server environment. It then uses HotRoute to move that content as quickly as possible.

Cache-on-Demand, on the other hand, uses caching devices from Blue Coat Systems, formerly CacheFlow. Customers decide what content they want cached and change the DNS address to point to NaviSite’s CDN network. Requests for non-cached content are automatically directed to origin servers, which can be in NaviSite data centers, on customer premises, or in third-party hosting facilities.

For a limited time, businesses that want to try out the Cache-On-Demand service from NaviSite can do so for free for a month. The free service allows for up to 2 terabytes of data to be delivered.

Normally, the Cache-On-Demand service starts at about $3.25 per gigabyte delivered.