What is CDN or Content Networking?
Now a days network engineer needs to be focus on content networking also known as content delivery network (CND) for efficient performance and QOS. Today in our large networks we are running video and voice for online services, web streaming technologies. These multimedia services demands content-aware technologies including content aware software and hardware, so that we can utilize our bandwidth for managing the network-traffic in most effective way.The basic idea behind the content network is to improve the data transfer speed and stability, so content delivery become faster and more stable. CDN is based on the IP network which builds the content-based access and application efficiency requirements, quality requirements and order of the content and provide content distribution and services. In other word with content networking we can divide our multimedia and web traffic with different tags or also marks for different QOS, we can redirect our traffic via different links. For example we can define different VLANs for voice and data on Cisco router.
We need to design our network more intelligent for handling different type of services, content networking has following three main components:
- Content Routing
- Content Caching
- Content Switching
Content Routing:
Content routing redirect the user to best device in network based upon the well define user polices. Content routing can deliver the content quickly as possible using high availability techniques and fast server responses. It is network load balancing technology, content router perform redirects, load balancing on multiple remote user’s request, so that the user requests for content sources get the fastest response.
Content Caching:
Using content caching you can cache the frequently access content. Cisco has “Cisco content Engine” for providing content caching. You can place the Cisco content Engine (CCE) on suitable location for content caching, for example if you have video streaming users in your network you can use Cisco Content Engine for those users for providing them quick services. Caching of Web content gives you the flexibility of serving documents locally from local cache server. The content caching feature allows you to store commonly accessed Web content on local server and users can get much faster response from that local server.
Content Switching:
Content switching is used for web internet, internet delivery and for e-commerce modules. You can perform the content switching with Cisco Content Distributor.
Content switching is based on content availability and server availability you can perform the content switching by POP cache server, using application layer switching, and flow splitting using different load balancing techniques.
Using content switching you can configure the applications to redirect requests to different servers with different content on the basis of different clients attributes.
- You can redirect the different traffic according to nature of request for example you can send the HTTP traffic to a specific Web server. If the request came from an IP phone, you can direct to a server or call manager that is capable of handling content that the user can view on his phone. A computer’s request is directed to a different server that is capable of handling content related to computer.
- For web traffic in different languages you can sends the request to different servers that serves content in that language. For example if a user has configured his browser to request the content in Spanish you can send this user to server that can handle the Spanish language request.
Benefits of Content Delivery Network?
CDN is a very good technique for optimizing online web services.
- The main advantage of CDN is that you can optimize your bandwidth in most efficient way, remote users access the server data from the cache, reducing the remote access bandwidth.
- Using CDN your site or network become more accessible you can access your site at any time and from any place.
- Local Cache improves corporate site access speed.
- Mirroring service eliminates the interconnection between different operators the impact of the bottleneck to achieve inter-carrier network acceleration, ensure that different users on the network can get access the network efficiently.
- With distributed cluster CDN nodes you can effectively prevent from hacking, various DoS attacks and also increase your network availability.
