Content networking vendor Volera Inc. on Monday upgraded its Velocity CDN (content delivery network) platform with features designed to streamline content and application delivery for enterprises and service providers.
Volera, a subsidiary of Novell Inc. with backing from Nortel Networks Corp. and Accenture Ltd., enhanced its offering to keep pace with the changing role of CDNs, according to Simon Khalaf, president of Volera in San Jose, Calif.
Less than two years ago the primary focus of CDNs was pushing public content to consumers to improve the Web experience, Khalaf said.
“What we are seeing now is CDN technology used to push business applications from headquarters or data centres into branch offices,” Khalaf said.
To that end, Velocity CDN gained a “virtual private” CDN capability that divides a CDN into separate views designed to ensure privacy and security of content distribution. The virtual private CDN lets enterprise IT managers pass administration access to business users or department managers, allowing content owners to publish and manage their own content, company officials said.
The ability to delegate management of CDN content is a key benefit for enterprises, according to Greg Howard, principal analyst and founder of HTRC Group LLC in San Andreas, Calif.
“Every time someone wants to distribute something through the CDN the IT guy has to do it,” Howard said. “If you can delegate some of the functions or tasks to the people who are producing the content it certainly lessens the load for IT workers.”
Targeting e-business application deployment, improvements to the Excelerator 2.2 cache server include centralized management of security policies such as authentication and access control. The new features allow administrators to centrally define and distribute enforcement of security policies to branch offices.
“This is not just improving security but making it more scalable,” Khalaf said.
The system also features support for content filtering through centralized management, according to Volera officials.
According to Howard, because most organizations do not have deep security expertise, centralized management and monitoring means that security know-how can be leveraged across the entire network rather than each security policy being put into place individually.
Volera also boosted its Media Excelerator product, which supports and manages IP multicast sessions for media types such as Windows Media, Real Networks Inc.’s RealProxy8, and Apple Computer Inc.’s Quick Time. Media Excelerator 1.2 features improved bandwidth utilization and better support for rich media applications such as e-learning and Webcasts.