Articles
Written by Janko Roettgers
Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 at 12:04 PM PT
If someone told you he'd pay for your FiOS Internet connection in exchange for you putting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server full of Russian movies in your living room, would you do it? And if someone told you that a network of residential NAS drives could serve your startup's video needs better than Amazon's S3, would you believe him? The Bay Area-based video startup Russart believes it can make the case for both.
Russart just introduced a pretty unusual infrastructure play called "People's CDN" (PCDN) that is entirely based on such residential nodes. The project is still in its infancy, with only two servers up at this time, but Russart CEO Oleg Sinitsin told me the plan is to eventually deploy up to 1,000 nodes, offering competitive rates to content publishers and sharing revenue with the people serving the content. "We are a people's venture," he wrote me in an email, "and people like to be rewarded."
I know what you're thinking. This guy has two NAS servers up, and already he wants to take on Amazon? Well, there actually is some back story to all of this. Russart has been working as a distributor for Russian and old USSR movies for a number of years now, according to Sinitsin, shipping physical DVDs with a Netflix-style subscription to customers in the U.S. and offering movie downloads to Russian expats worldwide.
It's somewhat of a quirky business, judging from its web site, offering forums to movie lovers and explanations on how to watch imported PAL DVDs in the U.S. Somewhere along the line, Sinitsin met like-minded expats who helped him to develop the business. "We just found on the web people we never knew, and they have become our partners and run shipping centers," he told me. That got him thinking: If the expat community can help with physical distribution, why not get their help for a download service as well?
Russart's download business started with Amazon's S3 servers, but Sinitsin didn't think the service didn't offer enough flexibility, so he came up with his NAS CDN scheme. "Today we serve 90 percent of video from PCDN, keeping Amazon S3 as backup service just in case," he explained. Sinitsin plans soon get up 10 servers to achieve a stable production environment, and then just grow from there.
And he's already trying to get customers for his offering. PCDN offers one Terabyte of download traffic and storage for $100 per month. That's admittedly a lot cheaper than even S3, which would charge you at least three times as much. Sinitsin also offers $150 per month to each participating node.
So what about the ISPs that have to shoulder PCDN's traffic? Sinitsin explained to me that his node operators get broadband services for business customers that allow them to host servers. "If some ISP gets fancy, they are not alone - fiber is becoming a commodity," said Sinitsin, who also plans to add some traditional web servers to the mix to deal with any potential ISP outages.
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Lafayette, CA, February 19, 2009 --(PR.com)--
People's CDN stands between datacenter based solutions by CDN powerhouses like Akamai, Limelight, or Level 3 and P2P networks. It runs many small nodes utilizing extra bandwidth of residential fiber optics connections like Verizon FIOS or PAXIO.
RussArt, a Silicon Valley startup, has released into production People's CDN (PCDN).
PCDN is highly distributed, being comprised of many small nodes. In this aspect, it stands between first tier CDNs and P2P networks. Each node is a NAS appliance, running Linux with Apache based custom software and housing a RAID of high capacity SATA drives.
Nodes are connected to Internet backbones via residential or commercial fiber optics hookups like Verizon FIOS or PAXIO with bandwidth from 20 to 100 Mbps.
Affordability, mostly residential deployment base, and profit sharing with node operators is what make it People's CDN.
The easiest way to highlight PCDN features is to compare it to a cloud storage solution like Amazon S3 with CloudFront.
With PCDN, content management is not based on some proprietary API. Instead, PCDN offers standard protocols including FTP, SFTP, SCP, and RSYNC. Thus, users do not depend on homemade clients, but instead use mature common tools.
Content is not organized in flat "buckets". Instead, PCDN offers a standard file system with subdirectories. Moving and renaming files is natively supported.
PCDN does not manage ACLs: everything is private. It is customer's business to authenticate (and charge) their users, and then serve them content via secure URLs.
PCDN supports file grouping, for example multiple parts of large video in file sequences like movie1-1.flv ... movie1-10.flv or folders like VIDEO_TS. Files in a group are stored and migrated together.
PCDN is fully transparent. Customers know exactly where their files are and can specify where they want them to be via custom content migration policy. Service comes not from some vague "East Coast datacenter", but from specific individually accessible nodes.
PCDN provides edge delivery without additional "edge caches". Highly distributed network of small nodes allows picking a perfect match based on content availability, network distance, and server load.
Last but not least, it costs less. Many small NAS appliances are cheaper than large datacenters, and low deployment costs are passed on to customers.
The first production client, Russian Movie Club in USA RussArt.com, has switched from Amazon S3 to PCDN in just a few days. Videos from Amazon are still offered as a backup, which makes a great demo site, allowing to compare these two solutions side by side.
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