Outsourcing Network Infrastructure

Benefits for the Enterprise

July 2009
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Outsourcing Network Infrastructure

Benefits for the Enterprise

In today’s online-centered economy, your company

website is a reflection of your brand and your
business. More often than not, it’s the initial
point of contact for prospects, customers,
and partners. The good news is this
gives you virtually limitless ways
to connect and engage with
constituents. The challenge is
that to ensure success, the tech-
nology that runs your site must perform
to meet your customers’ expectations.

Today, a world-class web experience incorporates rich media, interactivity, social

networking, user-generated content, and self-service file and software downloads. Yet
even the most dynamic site will suffer user attrition with slow-loading pages. Visitors have
little tolerance for poor website performance, which often forces even the most loyal
customers to click away.

Content delivery as an outsourced service

As enterprises embrace high-value content and community-building tactics as a
way to engage customers in a personalized dialog, IT departments must plan
carefully for their approach to delivering content, with a keen eye on how their
decisions will impact the user experience. When the delivery of website content
was limited to small files like text or still images, enterprises simply delivered from
in-house infrastructure. But today, as dynamic and rich media sites are the norm,
An outsource the complexity, service commitment, and cost are driving more enterprises to
model can provide consider outsourcing.

mission-critical The balance that today’s IT departments must strike is between minimizing costs
benefits to your and maximizing quality. That’s where a content delivery network (CDN) solution—
the ability to outsource site delivery and minimize network infrastructure cost,
company’s brand complexity, and management challenges—makes sense. For example, sometimes
and customer companies will use a CDN to accelerate only a portion of the web experience,
relationships. and then suffer quality issues on the portion they chose to deliver themselves. This
poor performance not only can damage the CDN investment, it can frustrate users
and create a negative brand impression.

Outsourcing content delivery may initially seem a costly option compared with
handling it internally. However, an outsource model can provide mission-critical
benefits to your company’s brand and customer relationships, while facilitating
future business growth.

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Increasing performance where it matters most

A significant benefit of outsourcing content delivery is the ability to offload traffic to a distributed computing network. By
working with a CDN to send content directly to the end-user’s last-mile connection, web servers are free to handle dynamic
content and transactions more efficiently. This translates into performance enhancements where they matter most—
business-critical applications.

Offloading origin infrastructure also has positive implications for content availability and reliability.

• Content availability is the most basic delivery measurement and can be impacted by server performance, bandwidth
capacity, and many other factors. Pinpointing the origin of an availability problem is critical to repairing the user
experience (and protecting your revenue stream) as quickly as possible. In addition, content availability means that
niche content should be just as accessible as new or popular content, such as a minutes-old podcast.
• Content reliability goes hand in hand with content availability to ensure the consistent quality-of-service that builds
your reputation and your audience base. Content optimization and site protection are two important benefits of
using a CDN. Technologies like persistent connections, object compression, cache control headers, and TTL overrides
go a step further by creating a personalized, dynamic visitor experience. Additional protection features can include
on-the-fly failover and load balancing to ensure your site never goes dark—because anything less than a brilliant
experience, every time, erodes your corporate brand.

Record traffic is not a bad thing—unless, of course, it takes your site down with it.
Content delivery services offer massive network capacity to handle peak loads
and flash crowds when they appear on the heels of breaking news, sports events,
emergency demands, or even prolific viral campaigns. The outsourced approach
offers important levels of elasticity and seasonality: the ability to stretch and meet
the height of demand at the exact time it’s needed, without paying for unused
“just in case” resources.

Globally distributed computing platform

A compelling online experience for businesses doesn’t just happen. It takes careful
planning to build a network that can avoid the congestion and bottlenecks that
While many slow traffic to end users. While many approaches have attempted to “optimize”
approaches the public Internet, one of the surest way to achieve consistent, predictable
performance is to bypass as much of the Internet as possible. This is the unique
have attempted
approach taken by Limelight Networks,® operators of one of the largest content
to “optimize” the delivery platforms in the world.
public Internet, one The Limelight Networks global computing platform features 25 Delivery Centers
of the surest way to placed in key networking hubs around the world. Each center consolidates
achieve consistent, hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of powerful delivery and “parent”
cache servers that act as a single system to deliver content to millions of users.
predictable The company offers direct object delivery into more than 900 last-mile networks
performance is to over a dedicated fiber-optic backbone, built from connections to the world’s
bypass as much largest networks, such as AT&T, Cox Communications, France Telecom, Deutsche
Telecom, and NTT.
of the Internet as
possible. Each of those 900+ connections represents a peering relationship—with the
flexibility to add, subtract, and scale immediately. If a peering point should become
overburdened, it’s easy to turn up additional connectivity. Rather than requiring your
IT department to build out infrastructure, deploy more servers, or redirect customer
traffic, your outsource partner can increase capacity on demand.

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In fact, with global capacity in excess of 2.5 terabits per second (2.5Tbps), the Limelight Networks CDN has the raw
capacity required to deliver to an audience roughly equivalent to four Nielsen ratings points. In other words, Limelight
Networks can help online businesses achieve consistent, concurrent service to
the largest Internet audiences—anywhere in the world.

The private computing platform essentially acts as a global Internet available only to Limelight Networks customers.
Over 85 percent of the content delivered by the CDN goes directly into the access networks where the content was
requested, never touching the congested public Internet.

Users Access Networks Limelight Networks CDN

User requests are routed Content is delivered via a direct Our dedicated fiber-optic
to the nearest strategically connection between the Delivery AMSTERDAM network interconnects all
located Delivery Center. Center and the user access Delivery Centers.
network, bypassing the
BRITIS congested Internet.
TELECOH LONDON
M
NEW YORK
SAN JOSE
JO
OSE
VERIZO
N

AT&T

PHOENIX

COX

SINGAPORE

LOS ANGEL
LES
ANGELES
NTT

TOKYO

If content is not currently cached

at the requested Delivery Center, our
CDN moves it from another Delivery
Center, or from a Limelight Networks
storage server, at the speed of light.
Your entire content library can be
stored directly on Limelight Networks
storage servers for the fastest
performance —or on your own
storage servers.

Designed for performance, reliability, and scalability, the Limelight Networks CDN delivers a brilliant online experience for your business.

Maximizing the visitor experience

A complete web page download may take many back-and-forth communications
between the browser and the originating server before the visitor can actually view the
entire page. If a privately operated network handles these exchanges, the performance
benefits work in both directions: content delivered to the end user is accelerated, and
requests for content from the end user are similarly accelerated back to the origin server.

For these communications, Limelight Networks leverages a routing technology called

OriginDirect.™ This innovation helps speed both the retrieval and delivery of all of the
objects that make up a website by using the private backbone to bypass the “middle-
mile” Internet bottlenecks. The concept is probably best explained with an analogy
that most people can identify with: navigating through highway traffic.

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Think of the public Internet as the highway, and the objects that make up a website are the cars. The objects have to
travel from their starting point (the originating server that stored them) to a destination (a web browser where they can
be viewed or interacted with). The “cars” drive on the highway and arrive at their destination in the expected time, just as
the website objects are retrieved and delivered and the web page loads quickly. Everything works perfectly—as long as
there’s no traffic.

But what happens when there’s traffic on the highway? Because of the congestion ahead, the cars must slow down and
will therefore arrive at their destination later than expected. That delay on the Internet means that a page will load more
slowly than expected, which could lead to a frustrated site visitor, a poor product demonstration, or even a lost sale.
Some CDNs will try to “optimally route” a car around the traffic jam on the highway, maybe directing the object off the
highway a few exits early to avoid the congestion. However, the fact remains that the objects still have to travel on the
road where the traffic is, and progress will be impeded. Even with “optimal routing,” the objects still arrive late, just not as
late as if they had stayed on the highway and waited for the traffic to clear up.

Rather than try to maneuver it around a traffic jam, OriginDirect helps content
avoid the congested highway altogether. So while cars on the public roads are
furiously dodging traffic, the objects on the Limelight Networks CDN are driving
OriginDirect freely on a privately operated and maintained highway. By avoiding the public
enables a highly Internet, OriginDirect enables a highly reliable, direct path to an originating server
reliable, direct path for retrieving static, dynamic, cacheable, or uncacheable content.

to an originating
server for retrieving Complete service for whole-site delivery
A global delivery platform, private peering relationships, and OriginDirect routing
static, dynamic,
technology provide a strong foundation for a superior online experience. But
cacheable, or as enterprises deploy interactive and dynamic content assets to build stronger
uncacheable customer relationships, they require specialized services to deliver their websites.
Recently introduced, the LimelightSITE™ whole-site delivery service is specifically
content.
designed to utilize the Limelight Networks computing platform to accelerate site
performance, protect user interactions, and lower the unit cost of delivering static,
dynamic, and rich media content.

1 Customers engage with your website.

2 Since our backbone connects into 900+ access networks,

LimelightSITE customers are most likely connected directly to our CDN.

Delivery at CDN Speeds 3 Your content is cached at Delivery Centers on the edge,
for immediate delivery to customers.

4 Our OriginDirect technology refreshes your content at

Limelight the speed of light—without ever touching the congested
Networks CDN public Internet.

5 Our data centers are massively equipped to host–

2 3 4 5 6 7
and even back up–all of your web content..
1
6 Content is refreshed from your servers as necessary. If your
servers are co-located with one of our data centers, we
can use IP Connect to create a private connection.

7 Your web servers are freed up to handle dynamic content

and transactions more efficiently.

LimelightSITE accelerates site performance, protects user interactions, and lowers the unit cost of delivering static,
dynamic, and rich media content.

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LimelightSITE provides IT departments with confidence that online operations will scale to meet seasonal and
promotional demands, while attracting and retaining valued customers through a consistent and engaging web
experience. The service is currently in use by more than 150 global businesses in the enterprise, e-commerce, financial,
and public sectors.

LimelightSITE starts by accelerating the performance of your website, helping to keep your visitors engaged through
fast page loads, high-quality rich media, and instant response to every interaction. Offloading delivery to the Limelight
Networks CDN brings with it another benefit: scalable geographic expansion. Since the Limelight Networks platform has
global presence, you can support business expansion into new regions, providing consistently accelerated performance
outside the U.S., even in traditionally “slow” geographies.

With LimelightSITE, it’s easy to upload, transcode, and manage large rich-media
content libraries. Businesses can define standard processes, including automatic
transcoding and posting of both professionally produced and user-generated
content. A Limelight Networks professional service team can even create
optimized content structures that can be maintained internally after development.

Up to 250GB of included storage adds scalability, redundancy, and reliability.

When combined with on-the-fly failover and load balancing, this storage
allowance enables businesses to offload volume management, shield servers
from high traffic loads, and ensure data safety and availability.
Limelight Networks
For detailed reports on storage and bandwidth utilization, historical data,
can also facilitate most requested content, geographic traffic, and more, the LimelightEXCHANGE™
the delivery portal provides full visibility into site activity and non-stop content control.
of software, Limelight Networks can also facilitate the delivery of software, games, videos,
games, videos, and other large files with fast, reliable online distribution. Software vendors,
game developers, and IT departments can choose from simple browser-
and other large
based downloads or a more controlled user experience with a customized
files with fast, download manager.
reliable online
distribution. Securing content and protecting interactions
Whether dealing with e-commerce transactions or internal corporate portal
log-ins, content security is an important priority to any enterprise. LimelightSITE
can protect your content using best practices such as geo-compliant delivery
based on the global locations of your users and security techniques that
protect content from misuse and common hijacking techniques.

Full support for SSL encryption protects connections from an edge server all the
way back to your origin server. Rather than risking security challenges over the
public Internet, you can even use the Limelight Networks private backbone as
a direct extension of your internal network, keeping the transaction chain secure
from end to end.

Proven performance gains

For IT departments, LimelightSITE works with the globally distributed Limelight
Networks computing platform and content delivery service to reduce internal
network infrastructure and build-out costs. Site operators can offload storage,
delivery, management, and network optimization functions—with confidence—to
this scalable, high-performance infrastructure. And even while reducing the internal
server resources, staffing expertise, and bandwidth needed to support your web
presence, you’ll see improvements in site availability and performance.

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Limelight Networks offers additional services and products for the enterprise, including: LimelightPS™ integration and
professional services for designing, building, and managing a best-in-class web infrastructure; LimelightSUPPORT™
Premium for expedited access to the services of one or more dedicated tier-two engineers; a cross-platform download
manager for electronic software distribution; and a cache-fill optimizer for on-network connectivity for
originating servers.

Grow your online business

Get started today.
Contact Limelight Networks
Outsourcing delivery infrastructure can help establish a more effective one-to-one
today. Our expert client services relationship with customers, partners, and prospects. Services like LimelightSITE make
team will work with you to it easy to enable community features and engage in two-way customer dialogues
develop a content delivery by incorporating social networking, customer-generated video, on-demand
solution that meets your training modules, live corporate events, and rich web applications into the online
business needs.
relationship—without the traditional trade-off of slower site performance. Improving
your web presence can also increase ROI by reducing costs in other functional
U.S. Corporate
areas: for example, self-serve training videos can reduce call center volume while
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© 2009 Limelight Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Limelight Networks is a registered trademark of Limelight Networks, Inc. The Limelight Networks logo, LimelightEXCHANGE,
LimelightPS, LimeligthSITE, LimelightSUPPORT, and OriginDirect are trademarks of Limelight Networks, Inc. Other products, company names, and logos may be trademarks of their
respective companies. All services are subject to change or discontinuance without notice. July 2009

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