MetaCDN: Enabling High Performance, Low Cost Content Storage and Delivery via the Cloud

Dr. James Broberg

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne

Date and time: 11.30am - 12.30pm, Friday 17th April, 2009

Venue: 10.08.04 (Building 10, Level 8, Room 4)

Abstract:

Many ‘Cloud Storage’ providers have launched in the last two years, providing internet accessible data storage and delivery in several continents that is backed by rigourous Service Level Agreements (SLAs), guaranteeing specific performance and uptime targets. The facilities offered by these providers is leveraged by developers via provider-specific Web Service APIs. For content creators, these providers have emerged as a genuine alternative to dedicated Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for global file storage and delivery, as they are significantly cheaper, have comparable performance and no ongoing contract obligations. As a result, the idea of utilising Storage Clouds as a ‘poor mans’ CDN is very enticing. However, many of these ‘Cloud Storage’ providers are merely basic storage services, and do not offer the capabilities of a fully-featured CDN such as intelligent replication, failover, load redirection and load balancing. Furthermore, they can be difficult to use for non-developers, as each service is best utilised via unique web services or programmer APIs. In this talk we describe the design, architecture, implementation and user-experience of MetaCDN, a system that integrates these ‘Cloud Storage’ providers into an unified CDN service that provides high performance, low cost, geographically distributed content storage and delivery for content creators.

About the speaker:

Dr. Broberg is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow researching “Coordinated and Cooperative Load Sharing between Content Delivery Networks” as part of the successful Discovery Grant (DP0881742,

2008-2010) with collaborators at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. He is based in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this, he completed his PhD at RMIT University in the Distributed Systems and Networking Group, in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology. More information on his research activities can be found at http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~brobergj.


Seminar Organisation

Seminars are free and open to the general public. No booking is necessary. If you are interested in giving a presentation in this seminar series, or to make suggestions for speakers, please contact Xiaodong Li, the seminar co-ordinator.