9:00 AM -- Whose storage does the world's second-biggest high-performance content delivery network use -- you know, the network that powers media companies like Akimbo, Amazon Unbox, FoxNews.com, MSNBC.com, MySpace, Xbox Live, and YouTube?
We weren't ready for the answer when we asked that question of Michael Gordon, cofounder and chief strategy officer of Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW), which brought down $130 million in new funding in 2006 and is, with Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM), leading the white-hot market for content delivery networks (CDNs) worldwide. (See Content Delivery Takes the Limelight in '06.)
Gordon told us: "Our server infrastructure is almost entirely Intel-based... We have no SAN or NAS."
It's true. Limelight's network, which costs upwards of $50 million to create, includes its own optical backbone, runs in all the major Internet hubs and colocation facilities worldwide, and sustains 10-Gbit/s internally, does not use any high-performance SAN, terabyte NAS, clustering, or virtualization.
Instead, the storage for its "many, many thousands" of servers is housed on home-grown Intel boxes with mostly SATA drives. These custom-built boxes are positioned strategically in the network to ensure that songs, videos, and other frequently-requested content is cached closest to where it's needed. Together, they act as a "storage layer" for the massive Limelight network.
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