Enterprise Content Delivery Network
Overview
Kontiki’s Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) is a patented solution with a secure, distributed delivery model to deliver video across enterprise networks, while minimizing traffic over the WAN by over 90%. With Kontiki, only one copy of each stream traverses the WAN into each office without the need for a multicast-enabled network or distributed hardware caches. Using Kontiki, our customers routinely deliver Terabytes of video to their employees on a weekly basis without negatively impacting their existing IP traffic.
Solution Components
There are two types of components in Kontiki’s ECDN - Dedicated centralized servers and distributed client software. Kontiki hosts the centralized servers in our production cloud and the distributed client software is deployed on each employee PC.
The central servers provide the following functionality:
- Content Management, Video Ingest, Metadata Management
- Content Security & Employee Authentication
- Network Management, Topology Awareness and Congestion Avoidance
- Remote management of all Client Software
- Origin Serving and Storage
- Business and IT Analytics
Client software distributed on end user PCs is responsible for:
- Streaming content to the PC from central servers or other clients
- Serving content to other authorized clients
- Routing around network bottlenecks
- Avoiding WAN congestion by dynamically throttling video traffic out of the way of higher priority traffic on the network
Key Benefits & Global Usage
| Minimal impact on existing network traffic | The Kontiki Delivery Protocol (KDP) provides adaptive throttling technology that assures that none of your existing network traffic is negatively impacted. Kontiki always gets out of the way. |
| Scales as your video use evolves | Kontiki’s distributed delivery technology actually increases in capacity and speed as more desktops are added. |
| No hardware or bandwidth upgrades | Does not require caching, routing, or any other network equipment or bandwidth upgrades. |
| Enterprise-class security, management, and control | End-to-end security with access control, encrypted delivery, and single sign-on including detailed usage and network delivery reporting. Centralized management keeps IT in control.
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| Enterprise-class security, management, and control | End-to-end security with access control, encrypted delivery, and single sign-on including detailed usage and network delivery reporting. Centralized management keeps IT in control. |
| Deployment in days | Rolled out to all employees in your company, in every location, in days or weeks versus months or years with a typical hardware deployments. |
| Proven solution and customer base | Successfully delivered over 100 million videos in 170 countries.View our customers. |
Centrally Managed
We designed our ECDN technology to deliver high-quality video to all of your employees on your existing corporate network, without any hardware or bandwidth upgrades necessary. The Kontiki Delivery Protocol (KDP) is a proprietary and secure delivery protocol designed by Kontiki to be extremely network efficient. KDP is by default UDP-based but will automatically fallback to TCP when UDP is not available. The clients will also tunnel KDP via HTTP when necessary to negotiate through proxy servers and firewalls.
As a video file is published to central servers and access control rights are assigned, it is virus checked and a digital signature map of the file is generated. At this point, the video is ready to stream to end users, either by our centralized origin servers, or via client peers over the LAN.
Note that Kontiki does not stream video from an arbitrary server on your corporate network.. Rather, our central servers maintain a network topology map of all the available servers (i.e. dedicated grid servers, or employee PCs with Kontiki’s client installed), what content they have cached or what live stream they are viewing, and arranges communications between servers that are topologically close to each other. Requesting clients are provided with a list of the nearest servers that have the on-demand video cached or are currently streaming the live video. One of our centrally provisioned directory servers that is configured for your network manages all of this delivery activity. All of the communication between requesting clients is encrypted, and all content delivery is performed transparently for each end-user.
The Most Secure Enterprise CDN Available
Kontiki has designed the most secure enterprise content delivery network in the industry. Security measures include:
- Only authorized users can publish content into the system. Files on a PC that were not published to the central servers cannot be distributed via Kontiki’s Enterprise CDN. In other words, only content that is published to our central servers can be delivered by our ECDN.
- Only authenticated employees can request and receive content.
- All video streams are encrypted while traversing over the network. Content cannot be ‘sniffed’ or ‘stolen’ over the wire.
- Content altered by an end user cannot be propagated to other users in the network via Kontiki. Digital signatures are generated and signed by a central authority and verified by peers before the content is deemed authentic.
- Content cached on any PC or server is stored in encrypted form.
Learn more about Kontiki's end-to-end security framework.
Self-Scaling
The power of our ECDN is that our edge nodes act as “shock absorbers” for the network during sudden spikes in demand.
During a VOD wave, at the time of the first request for a newly available video, only the origin servers have the item and none of the clients have it. While the servers do all of the initial work of streaming or delivering this new content they are “seeding” the distributed clients in your private Kontiki ECDN. As a few clients each obtain part of the content item, they are able to begin serving that part to multiple other clients on the LAN; the serving power of the network then rapidly increases beyond the power of the central servers alone.
In the case of a large scale live webcast, when one user in a remote office chooses to start watching a live stream, Kontiki will source that stream over the WAN from a Kontiki central streaming server. However, regardless of how many other users in that office want to watch that same live stream, Kontiki will source that stream from other Kontiki clients on the same LAN ensuring that only one copy of the stream will traverse the WAN. This is the optimally efficient and desired outcome for video delivery over the WAN.
In addition to dynamically handling high sudden demand waves, Kontiki’s ECDN solution also self scales by the virtue of being software based. By simply making the Kontiki client a standard part of the desktop image, each time a new PC or new office is added to the network, you are automatically video-enabling that user or office location.
Network Efficient
The major advantage of our ECDN technology is network efficiency. For live video streaming, Kontiki’s delivery technology provides you with the efficiency of a multicast-enabled network without needing to multicast-enable your network. For Video on Demand (VOD) streaming, Kontiki provides the efficiency of a dedicated caching appliance at every office location without deploying and managing any dedicated appliances. Our software ensures that only one copy of a stream will traverse the WAN into each office location regardless of how many users at that office request the stream.
Won’t Impact Existing Traffic
The Kontiki Delivery Protocol (KDP) is designed to be deferential to other traffic on the network when streaming on-demand video. The client monitors network latency for each connection in real time and can be configured to throttle itself down when congestion is about to occur on the WAN. Business critical traffic can be given priority over Kontiki VOD traffic to ensure video delivery will not impact other business functions requiring the WAN.
Unparalleled Fault Tolerance
Kontiki’s Delivery Management System (DMS) is the most scalable and fault tolerant enterprise content delivery network available. All components of the Kontiki SaaS ECDN are designed to seamlessly failover as sources move in and out of service. In contrast, in a hardware-based solution, when a distributed caching device fails, a large group of users can be affected until that component is repaired.
Provides Full Control of Network Routing
Kontiki’s ECDN solution allows the network operator complete control of how content will be delivered across their network with Kontiki "localities." A locality is an administratively defined group of end-users, defined by topological location. The locality-based delivery feature lets you customize the content delivery policy for specific clients in your network to promote optimal routing of content and control WAN bandwidth usage.
Will Not Impact End User’s Desktop
Kontiki’s experience in large-scale enterprise deployments combined with our advanced client side real-time monitoring capabilities ensure that the desktop performance is not impacted. The client is certified on Windows 2000®, Windows XP®, Windows Vista®, and Windows 7®. CPU utilization while serving video is typically 5 percent on older PCs and often less that 3 percent on more modern PCs.
The Kontiki client monitors memory utilization, CPU utilization, free disk space remaining and other critical desktop performance indicators in real time. And, if CPU utilization, for example, reaches a centrally configurable threshold because a CPU intensive application is running alongside Kontiki, the client will dynamically throttle itself down and adjust its resource utilization to ensure the end user is not impacted.
Since the client can act as a caching server for other clients on the network, it has facilities built in to monitor how much disk space its cache is using and will automatically age out content from the cache as disk space is needed. The size of the disk cache Kontiki uses is centrally configurable.
Centrally Managed
Since Kontiki’s software-CDN solution is centrally managed, it enables the network operator to control all the parameters the system uses for traffic routing via an easy to use central Network Manager console. Also, many other configuration parameters such as bandwidth utilization limits, CPU utilization thresholds, if a particular client or groups of clients should not be allowed to act as servers, and client side disk caching policies can be modified via a central console and those changes are automatically propagated to all the Kontiki clients. Kontiki’s Deep Delete feature event lets you remotely delete a video file from all PCs that have that file cached.
