MetaCDN: Harnessing Storage Clouds for High Performance Content Delivery

Content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Akamai and Mirror Image place web server clusters in numerous geographical locations to improve the responsiveness and locality of the content it hosts for end-users. However, their services are priced out of reach for all but the largest enterprise customers. An alternative approach to content delivery could be achieved by leveraging existing infrastructure provided by ‘Storage Cloud’ providers, who offer internet accessible data storage and delivery at a fraction of the cost. In this paper, we introduce MetaCDN, a system that exploits ‘Storage Cloud’ resources, creating an integrated overlay network that provides a low cost, high performance CDN for content creators. MetaCDN removes the complexity of dealing with multiple storage providers, by intelligently matching and placing users’ content onto one or many storage providers based on their quality of service, coverage and budget preferences. MetaCDN makes it trivial for content creators and consumers to harness the performance and coverage of numerous ‘Storage Clouds’ by providing a single unified namespace that makes it easy to integrate into origin websites, and is transparent for end-users. We then demonstrate the utility of this new approach to content delivery by showing that the participating ‘Storage Clouds’ used by MetaCDN provide high performance (in terms of throughput and response time) and reliable content delivery for content consumers, whilst the MetaCDN system itself introduces minimal overhead compared to using these ‘Storage Clouds’ directly. Crown Copyright & 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.