Highwinds Adaptive Storage™ is a cloud of globally distributed nodes with flexible storage capabilities, optimized to function seamlessly with Highwinds' global CDN. Like never before, content owners and distributors can store assets at different levels, and adapt to the demand for content…maximizing price and performance. The contents of the Adaptive Storage platform are managed by a Directory Listing Service (DLS) that provides a unified view of all files stored within the system, and facilitates the purging, renaming and moving of files globally. The platform can be configured in StrikeTracker 2, so you can self-provision internal origins and can start uploading content immediately, placing it on the CDN backbone for optimized performance.

Features:

• Self-provision origin storage
• No need to split content across multiple libraries due to size restrictions
• Set-up and management tools available in StrikeTracker 2
• Better performance AND lower prices than Amazon S3

With Mid-Tier Caching, the CDN edge servers are configured to pull from the Adaptive Storage Virtual File System (VFS), and VFS will in turn pull from your origin. The purpose of this two-tiered pull is to maintain different retention policies at each layer of the system. By configuring Mid-Tier Caching, the VFS platform sits between the CDN's edge caches and your origin, and can retain less-popular content for significantly longer periods of time. As all content remains within the CDN, operating within the Highwinds network, re-pulls from the mid-tier cache are considerably faster than pulls from your origin, and eliminate any additional origin traffic.

Features:

• Deeply integrated with the CDN edge cache
• Maintain different retention policies at each layer of the system
• Policy provisioning in StrikeTracker 2 with as little as one click
• Better performance AND lower prices than Amazon S3

Highwinds is now supporting testing of HTTP-chunked live video for select customers on a limited trial basis.

Benefits of HTTP Live Streaming:

• True HTTP Streaming
  This is not HTTP "Progressive Download" or "Pseudostreaming" -- these new protocols are sophisticated, streaming-focused delivery mechanisms that simply use HTTP as their foundation.
• Scalability
  Allows Highwinds (and any CDN) to more effectively support live streaming via standard HTTP caches. Virtually all CDNs have more HTTP capacity available than RTMP capacity, which means that traffic can be distributed across a larger pool of servers. More servers means an increased ability to effectively absorb spikes in streaming traffic while maintaining a highly responsive and performant delivery service.
• Performance
  HTTP-chunked streaming benefits from the greatest amount of system tuning possible, based upon the relatively lower degree of complexity in the HTTP protocol vs. the RTMP protocol. The new HTTP-chunked protocols ride on top of standard HTTP, and inherit 100% of these benefits.
• Stability
  As a stateless delivery method, individual chunks within a single stream can be served off of multiple servers across the entire CDN, rather than each stream being tightly bound to a single server. This means that long-running streams can continue to be served successfully as the status of network routes and infrastructure servers changes over time.

Supported protocols:

• Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming
• Apple iPhone / iPad (HLS) Streaming
• Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming

Attributes of the solution:

• Chunking must be performed on the customer's own origin or encoder
• Initially, setup must be performed by Highwinds support team engineers to ensure that caching policies are correctly tuned for live video
• The origin must generate "clean" manifests that do not interfere with the CDN's ability to cache objects for standard HTTP delivery. Some origins (such as the Wowza Media Server) are known to inject data into the manifest that disrupts effective caching.