Two of our executives hosted a webinar last week with Information Week on Solving Web and App Management Issues through Infrastructure Outsourcing. The premise of the presentation (now archived for on-demand viewing) is that the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure extend beyond reducing hardware costs. There are also scale, software and security advantages to consider.

The beginning of the presentation centers on how website and application management have evolved significantly in recent years. For example, the number of servers required to run a single website or application has grown substantially. This is partly because web content has grown more dynamic, but also partly because developers often operate under the assumption that computing and storage resources are virtually free. Resource optimization isn’t a priority when there’s no quantifiable cost. That has a big impact on the scale of infrastructure required to support online assets.

On the software side of the equation, there are new complications in web and app management because of online performance expectations, and also the need to manage distribution across multiple platforms. These are critical concerns for IT, but they’re also not core competencies for most organizations. By outsourcing infrastructure components, companies can also address these issues through services like website and application acceleration, and mobile delivery optimization.

The discussion becomes more complicated when you add in security concerns, but here again, there can be advantages to infrastructure outsourcing. For example, supporting premium content and commercial transactions introduces issues of controlling rights-based access and managing requirements like PCI compliance. For some organizations, these issues are best managed in house. For others, it makes sense to offload non-core functions and focus on other business priorities.

The Information Week webinar goes into far more detail on these topics and related issues. Take a listen and view the slide deck at your leisure for further insights from David Reisfeld, GM of Limelight Content Delivery Solutions, and Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a webinar, but we have a new one coming up on September 28th with Information Week. Join us for:

Scale, Software, & Security – Solving Web and App Management Issues through Infrastructure Outsourcing

Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Time: 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Register Here

Infrastructure outsourcing is about much more than server capacity and distributed storage. New requirements in website and application management are placing increasing demands on IT departments, and many organizations aren’t able to match internal resources to the new challenges at hand. System availability and online performance are at stake, as are the competitive advantages that come with being able to move quickly to upgrade software and support new features and functionality.

This webinar will examine the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service in the areas of web and app performance, software agility, and online security management. Join us to learn about solutions to some of the most common problems facing resource-constrained IT departments today, including:

• Dynamic web acceleration
• Streaming media support
• Cross-platform content delivery
• Content security and policy management

A large amount of Internet traffic today is conducted by a small handful of companies. Arbor Networks noted this traffic consolidation back in 2009 when it coined the term “hyper giants.” According to Arbor Networks at the time: “Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – ‘hyper giants’ like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.”

That was nearly two years ago, and the consolidation trend hasn’t reversed. Only a small number of companies have the capacity to conduct a measurable amount of the world’s IP traffic. As a reminder of why Limelight Networks is one of those companies, here is a recap of some of the numbers we published as part of our last earnings report back in May. These numbers are an indicator of our network scale. They’re not new, and they don’t tell the whole story of what we have to offer in content delivery, but they’re certainly a good reference point. And worth repeating.

Limelight Networks Platform Scale and Reach from the May 5th Earnings Report:

• 2.5+ billion objects delivered hourly
• 6+ Tbps egress capacity
• Directly connected to last-mile networks serving 85%+ of world’s connected population
• 11+ PB storage capacity

There’s a lot of news out this week from the cable industry in conjunction with the annual Cable Show conference taking place this year in Chicago. Comcast demoed new cloud-based TV services today that are currently being trialed in Augusta Georgia, and it said it’s planning to test a cloud-based Remote Storage DVR service in the near future. Meanwhile, HBO announced that it’s hit 2.7 million downloads with the still-new HBO Go app, and ESPN is not far behind with more than two million downloads of the ESPN Mobile app. TV is indeed going Everywhere.

But how exactly are operators powering all of this TV in the cloud? Given the huge amount of resources required – bandwidth, storage, and processing power - that’s not an easy question.

From an infrastructure perspective, cable operators are working feverishly to build out new systems that support converged media delivery and take a page out of the CDN industry’s book. However, lost in the excitement of new cable infrastructure initiatives is the fact that MSOs are heavily focused on the last mile of television delivery. The last mile is what cable operators are good at, but there’s a whole lot of network behind that last mile that has to be managed as well. Throughout the entire end-to-end delivery chain, there are bandwidth, storage, and processing demands to contend with, and that’s a huge challenge for cable companies as they start to build out their cloud TV services in volume. How can TV service providers optimize the middle mile of the Internet? How will they reach the scale and capacity levels they need to deliver TV everywhere? How is it possible to manage the entire experience given the largely uncontrolled environment created by the Internet?

Cable has a lot of innovative projects in the works as the industry looks to the cloud for its next-generation television platform. But it’s also got a lot of work to do to power those projects given the scale and complexity of the infrastructure support they require. There’s nothing magic about cloud-based TV. As good as it may look in conference demos, there are still a number of hurdles ahead before cable can make good on its cloud TV promise.

The city of Chattanooga Tennessee has deployed its own gigabit broadband network, and over the holiday weekend, industry analyst Craig Settles detailed in two posts just what the community is doing with all that broadband.

In the short term, Chattanooga is applying its new bandwidth for smart grid technologies that help the city save money through reduced power outages. Over the longer term, city officials plan to use their massive data pipe as an economic development engine. Futuristic applications like 3D modeling and high-end simulations are already in the works through government initiatives and through the locally headquartered company SimCenter Enterprises. Here’s how Settles described why a gigabit network is important for this type of work:

“High-end modeling and simulation is a bandwidth hog if you want to loop in people working at other locations into the “what if” process. However, a gigabit network enables a small company in a mid-sized city to become the center of a world of supercomputers, international research teams and corporate giants.”

Lamp Post founders want to use the gigabit network to encourage entrepreneurs

Chattanooga isn’t stopping with SimCenter either. It hopes to woo more businesses with big data dreams through the promise of high-capacity broadband. The local venture organization Lamp Post Group is inviting college students for internships this summer to build gigabit applications and compete for start-up capital. And the local community college started a gaming degree program last fall as part of an attempt to recruit professionals from the gaming industry.

Chattanooga has recognized the advantages of building a foundation on big broadband, and it is seeing first hand how high-capacity infrastructure can drive innovation and business growth. Big broadband supports big data, which in turn opens up big opportunities.

Recently, our VP of Global Services David Frigeri sat down with Network World’s Jim Malone for an audiocast discussion on the next phase of cloud computing. The talk covers market drivers for moving into the cloud, capacity considerations, and how to plan for data and/or systems migration. It’s an excellent exploration of what many companies are facing today in an era of global audiences (consumers, employees, etc.) and distributed infrastructure. Register here, and take a listen to the discussion for free.

There’s been an explosion in both IaaS and cloud computing activity over the last six months, with new players entering the field, and more and more companies recognizing the need for distributed storage and processing resources. It’s one thing, however, to outsource hardware and CPU cycles, and quite another to have those resources provided as part of a managed service. Both outsourcing models exist, but there are still wide gaps in understanding around what specific services are available, and where it make sense to transition from the former model to the latter.

The sheer infrastructure capacity required to support an online business today is enough to force many companies to look outside their own data centers and delivery networks. The fear there, however, is finding an option that meets specific business requirements as they relate to outsourced infrastructure assets. For an enterprise, the worry might be around security and guaranteed uptime. For a media company, it might be around knowing how to manage software issues like media encoding and user authentication on an outsourced hardware platform. In addition, different industries have different major players involved. If there’s any interfacing to be done with one of these third-party industry companies – say a telecom carrier, for example – then an outsourced infrastructure solution has to be provisioned and managed for that scenario.

The bottom line here is that infrastructure outsourcing today – and its offshoot, cloud computing – goes beyond the vision of grid computing a decade or so ago. Managed services can and often should play a key role. In fact, what we may see in the coming months is a growth in specialized IaaS offerings that cater to different industries and business needs. Gigabytes (terabytes, petabytes…), CPU cycles, and bandwidth capacity do not exist in a vacuum. Putting them to work toward a specific purpose is what IaaS offerings should do for the growing legion of web-based companies looking to offload infrastructure management as a non-core business function.

It’s that time again, and in case you missed it, we announced first quarter earnings for Limelight Networks late on Thursday. Here are some of the highlights.

• Revenue of $49.8 million in Q1
• Delivering 2.5 billion objects hourly
• Storage capacity of 11+ PB
• 11+ billion online add impressions served in Q1
• Mobile internet and tablet computing revenue growth approximately 300% year-over-year
• Online video platform growth approximately 100% year-over-year
• Site and application acceleration services growth exceeded 100% year over year

Last week GigaOM hosted a conference in New York on Big Data, a sister event to the annual Structure conference held on the west coast. We were on site for the day, and came away awash in big numbers and big ideas. Certain themes repeated over and over again. The increasing scale and decreasing cost of storage, computer processing, and bandwidth are combining to create a foundation for new applications and new application models. We’re at a major tipping point. It’s not just that we can do things faster. We can approach problems differently because of the new resources we have available.

Taking a step back, one of the ideas the speakers discussed last week was the need for scale-out storage to go hand in hand with greater computational capabilities. The more information there is, the more need there is to process and analyze that data. We’ve always collected information, but until recently we haven’t stored most data in massive quantities. For example, businesses have traditionally only stored security camera footage for a limited period of time. But what if they had stored footage from every moment of every day going back decades? Consider the analysis implications around human behavior, visitor demographics, traffic patterns over time, and more.

And in addition to big data that’s always been available, we also have new data flowing our way. Jeff Jonas, a Distinguished Engineer from IBM, quoted a stat that there are 600 billion transactions a day being created in the US alone based on mobile phone geo-locational data. Storing it all could be useful, but only if we had the ability to provide deep context for the data, and near-real-time analysis.

Which takes us to computation and computational performance. Big data sets require big analysis, and that requires high-performance computing. Our computing capability on individual systems continues to grow, but we can increase that power exponentially by moving to a parallel, distributed computing model. Higher performance isn’t just about speed. It’s about enabling whole new lines of thought. As Jim Baum, CEO of Netezza (also part of IBM) put it last week, if it takes three days to get back an answer to a question, you won’t ask the follow-up question, or the question after that. If you get an answer in three seconds, the dynamic changes significantly.

The implications of big data and big data analysis are astounding in their scale. There are things we’re already seeing implemented today, like real-time language translation and augmented reality apps, but there are also huge opportunities for causal analysis and even prediction engines. What’s the impact of migration on GDP? How do we better predict the trajectory of a disease outbreak? The more data we have, and the more effectively we can process it, the more we’ll be able to discover and apply to our world for better business, and better living. That’s big data in a nutshell. And it’s a big deal.

Want to read more? Here are some of the GigaOM posts covering last week’s Big Data event.

• Reducing Data Latency Leads to Faster Decisions
• Is Big Data Making Us Dumber?
• Big Data Could Be Cloud’s Killer App