Monetizing the Edge with Content Delivery Networks CONTENTS INTRODUCTION
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MONETIZING THE EDGE WITH CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORKS CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Introduction ..................................................................... 2 Edge computing is increasingly prevalent and will become even more so as the use of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) devices enter Why are Content Delivery Networks important? ..... 3 the mainstream. By locating key data processing functions closer to What are the key CDN challenges? ............................. 4 the edge, there’s no need to transmit data to the cloud and back for What are Intel's solutions for CDN? ............................ 5 analysis, so latency is less of an issue. Also, since edge data centers are increasingly self-sufficient, it is still possible to keep services up and Memory, bandwidth and storage .................................... 5 running even when other parts of the infrastructure are down. Accelerators ............................................................................ 6 Sixty nine percent of service providers already have plans to deploy Ecosystem acceleration ..................................................... 6 multi-access edge computing (MEC)i. Yet the majority are still trying Open Visual Cloud ............................................................... 6 to figure out the golden use case that will monetize their investment. There’s a lot of talk about cloud gaming, 360-degree virtual reality (VR), Intel® Select Solutions ....................................................... 7 and immersive media, but the real use case driving return on investment Conclusion ........................................................................ 8 (ROI) today is content delivery networks (CDNs). In this eguide you’ll discover why CDNs are becoming increasingly lucrative, the key challenges associated with CDN delivery, and how an integrated, end-to-end computing infrastructure optimized for media workloads can address these. WHY ARE CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORKS IMPORTANT? Media is transforming. Thanks to our insatiable appetite for live and on-demand video, the global video streaming market will be worth USD 102B by 2023ii. Consumers expect this web and video content anytime, anywhere and on any device. And as the content gets richer, more localized, personalized, interactive and immersive, the pressure is on for service providers to deliver more than just ‘media’ content to their customers; they must deliver Visual Cloud experiences. These range from media processing and delivery, through to new services such as media analytics and dynamic ad insertion. CDNs enable service providers to deploy these services at the edge of the network, which means they can deliver richer content to widely distributed, and often mobile, consumers. WHAT ARE THE KEY CDN CHALLENGES? 1. Web content: With rapid rise in encrypted web traffic, more businesses are using encryption as the primary method of securing web content. CDN providers are required to match the growing levels of data from CDN USE CASE CHALLENGES secure sockets layer (SSL)/ transport layer service (TLS) encrypted websites. This requires cryptography to be done by the server’s CPU located in CDN infrastructure. Increasing the throughput requires CDN SSD • Need more cores for security encryption/ providers to upgrade those servers to the latest processor technology. crypto acceleration 2. Long-tail content: With growth in over-the-top (OTT) services and Transparent caching video traffic, large Internet traffic spikes are everyday occurrences. To overcome this challenge, many CDN providers are transitioning to higher connectivity of 100G per cache node to scale their node level • Maximizing available throughput performance. For long-tail video content such as video-on-demand SSD • Overprovisioning of capacity to meet (VOD) and cloud digital video recorder (DVR) usages, this requires CDN HDD throughput demand providers to transition to high throughput storage such as non-volatile • Failure rates with HDD memory express (NVMe)-based storage devices to be able to fully Long-tail content utilize the available network throughput. 3. Live streaming: One of the other challenges faced by CDN providers Memory • Exponential rise in live streaming traffic is with live linear content streaming. The live streaming video market • Lower glass-to-glass latency is growing at an alarming rate and since the content is immediately • Need for more memory, low latency caching distributed to the end users, large memory capacity is needed to Live streaming and hot VOD caching buffer each of the many independent streams a CDN server needs to handle. Unfortunately, large capacity dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs) are expensive. Figure 1: Key CDN challenges. These key use case specific challenges are shown in figure 1. WHAT ARE INTEL’s solUTIONS FOR CDN? ACCELERATORS Intel offers comprehensive, interoperable end-to-end • High-density accelerators like those from Celestica – see encoding, low latency, competitive 3D performance, and media solutions to help service providers better meet the figure 2 – can help to maximize performance on edge nodes multiple Windows games per card, VCAC-R can handle four aforementioned CDN challenges so that they can better Windows game streams at 1080p 30FPS, and at 720p 30FPS • First, the Intel® Visual Cloud Accelerator Card – Analytics serve their existing customers, as well as extend their CDN to can handle 20 Android game streams (VCAC-A) is optimized for the highest density offload support emerging edge cloud use cases. acceleration for use in network edge servers. The new • As an alternative to upgrading to the latest processor acceleration solution combines both on-card decode and technology to manage encryption throughput for secure MEMORY, BANDWIDTH AND STORAGE video inference acceleration, along with high efficiency, FP16 web content, Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) • Intel® QLC 3D NAND SSDs are ideally suited for high- precision that can manage 24 streams at 1080p 30FPS, up cards help to offload cryptography from the CPU to expand capacity, high-volume use cases such as VOD and cloud DVR to 144 streams per server with six cards its SSL/TLS throughput, while being cost efficient. For inline SSL/TLS processing, CDN providers can further utilize the • Intel® Optane™ SSDs provide extremely high reliability and • Second, the Intel® Visual Cloud Accelerator Card – Render Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card (Intel® FPGA performance compared to hard disk drives (HDDs) and (VCAC-R) is optimized for cloud gaming, graphics, VR, and PAC) N300 standard SSDs. These drives are best suited for hot content virtual desktops. With high-performance rendering and use cases • Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory provides a bigger memory footprint at a low total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster access to storage by bringing data closer to the Density-Optimized Workload Optimized Performance/TCO CPU. This technology helps service providers meet growing RENDERING ANALYTICS Low Power demand for latency-sensitive use cases such as live and linear streaming • High 3D performance at competitive TCO • Optimized for high-density edge analytics • 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors support • Low latency rendering and encoding • Up to 24 real-time streams on board demanding CDN workloads, with two 48-core sockets, 12 • Multiple windows games per card • Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU memory channels per socket, high-speed interconnect and cache optimizations, and balanced I/O to meet the demands of high-performance storage solutions • Extending intelligence to the edge, Intel® Xeon® D processors support high-density, single-socket network, storage and cloud edge computing solutions with a range of integrated security, network and acceleration capabilities Figure 2: Visual Cloud Accelerator cards from Celestica. EcOSYSTEM ACCELERATION • Intel is working to accelerate the CDN ecosystem through collaboration with communication and cloud service providers; workload characterization and performance turning; and hardware and software optimizations with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), systems integrators (SIs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) – see figure 3 CUSTOMER COLLABORATION WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION AND PERFORMANCE TUNING OPEN VISUAL CLOUD Replication of customer CDN environment in Performance and security optimizations • To help strengthen the ecosystem and Intel Labs (3 labs located in AZ, MA, PRC) provide ready access to the building blocks Guidance on best practices for CDN deployments and pipelines for cost-effective Visual Cloud Engagements with telco CDN providers, (targeted white papers, sizing guides, case studies innovations, Intel has set up the Open Visual OTT providers, next wave CSPs and detailed documentation) Cloud project. It provides availability of high performance, high quality, open source, validated building blocks across encode, decode, inference, and rendering – see figure 4, as well as reference pipelines that HW AND SW OPTIMIZATIONS support visual cloud workloads. The goal is to minimize barriers to innovation for quickly Join testing and optimization with OEMs, SIs and ISVs and easily creating and monetizing Visual Cloud services. Support for familiar industry standard frameworks use the larger open Validated solution with CDN stack improvements (Linux, NGINX, ATS) source community and include media (FFMPEG and GStreamer), AI (TensorFlow, Caffe, MXNet, ONNX, Kaldi), and graphics (OpenGL, DirectX) Figure 3: Characterization and