IBM Video Streaming ECDN provides a solution to relieve network bottlenecks associated with delivering video content to locations, such as corporate offices, where you have a high number of concurrent viewers watching the same video content, such as a live broadcast or previously recorded videos. ECDN servers cache a single copy of a video asset, which is then delivered across the local network to viewers. Till now the content was only cached to memory, and was lost on every reboot. Now, you can store the cache content to a persistent data store in the virtual appliance for ECDN.
For live broadcasts, storing video content in the memory of the ECDN server has been a sufficient solution. Video assets had to be stored only for a short-time, to support real-time viewing of the video content.
Caching recorded videos requires long-term storage of the video assets on the ECDN servers. From now on, you can attach a secondary disk to each ECDN server, where recorded videos will be stored encrypted for up to 1 year.
Long-term storage also means that the content stored on the cache disk is preserved across reboots of the ECDN server and even during software upgrades.
Video content will be stored for up to 1 year to the extent of the disk capacity. When the cache disk is full, the oldest videos (age is defined by when it was last accessed) will be deleted.
How to attach cache disk
Follow these steps to attach a cache disk to an ECDN server instance:
- Create a new virtual disk in your hypervisor. Minimum 4 GB disk is required for caching recorded videos.
- Attach this new virtual disk to the virtual appliance of youre ECDN server.
- Reboot the ECDN server.
- The new disk will be detected and formatted automatically, and the server instance will start to use it. You can check this on the ECDN Management Portal. It will appear as “Cache disk” on the detailed view of your ECDN server.