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The Cisco Content Distribution Network (CDN) allows organizations to maximize the impact of Web communications by making possible the rapid delivery of high-quality video, rich audio, large graphics, presentations and documents over corporate wide-area and local-area networks.
This document provides instructions on the use and administration of your CDN, including the Content Distribution Manager (CDM), a Web-based interface that is the main conduit to the network for users and administrators. The CDM includes features for configuring new devices and users on the CDN, creating and populating content channels, allocating bandwidth, viewing media over the CDN, and more.
This chapter provides a basic conceptual and functional overview of the CDN, including the CDM and Content Engines (CEs) that make up the CDN, as well as the architecture (SODA) that enables the CDN to efficiently route content.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Using the CDN (Figure 1-1), Internet devices take advantage of the Self-Organizing Distributed Architecture (SODA) to efficiently route high bandwidth content. This enables your organization to leverage existing bandwidth to deliver high-quality media to the desktops of target audiences within your organization.
The Self-Organizing Distributed Architecture (SODA) is a proprietary technology that utilizes sophisticated algorithms to efficiently route high-bandwidth media over office networks or even over the Internet. The foundation of the Cisco CDN software, SODA eliminates network bottlenecks that often accompany large multimedia streaming products.
From your Web browser, you select the media you wish to review. CEs deliver the media to your desktop without the typical delays and latency associated with high-bandwidth media streaming through a data network. All you need is a standard Web browser and media player, such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
To take advantage of the SODA technology, you must have established a CDM and at least one CE on your office LAN. The CDN is scalable to multiple sites through the addition of CEs to the network.
The Content Distribution Manager (CDM) connects to your corporate data network and replicates media to the connected CEs located across your LAN. The CDM:
The CDM provides control of media replication. Through a browser-based interface, you specify how much bandwidth is to be used for media replication. With the content channels feature, content can be organized into manageable channels that replicate media to distribution lists.
Through the interface you can:
Access the CDM interface from your browser by typing the CDM URL or IP address.
When end users request a media file from the CDM, the CE receives redirection commands from the CDM and streams media on request to the desktop locally. Using the SODA technology, CEs are able to calculate the fastest route for distributing media to viewers, and to optimize the allocation of network bandwidth for content replication.
The CDN supports standard media file types, including:
Any standard media format can be imported and distributed using the CDN.
From a CDM, you can import and replicate, or distribute, your media files through the CDN to CEs. The network uses standard Internet TCP/IP protocols for all communication.
Media is imported to the CDM in an efficient manner and is downloaded to CEs according to bandwidth constraints you set. Using a Web browser, your users can view these media files on their PCs.
All transfers are fault-tolerant. This means that if a file transfer is interrupted, the replication process picks up where it left off, rather than resending the entire channel.
Posted: Wed Sep 27 14:14:11 PDT 2000
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