Making data move fast – I mean really, really fast

By , 26 April 2013 at 20:17
Making data move fast – I mean really, really fast
Business

Making data move fast – I mean really, really fast

By , 26 April 2013 at 20:17
Tags:
CLOUD

By Alex Salkever (@alexsalkever), Global Product Expert – Cloud, Telefonica Digital

So we recently announced a partnership with Push Technology to offer their “data distribution solution” (based on Push Technology’s Diffusion server) as a virtual appliance hosted in Telefonica’s Instant Servers.

Push Technology’s Enterprise Cloud offering is designed to leverage the unique capabilities of our Instant Servers to deliver extremely low latency in a public cloud environment.

With SmartOS as its underlying virtualization and compute environment, the Push Technology’s Diffusion Enterprise Cloud appliance can scale up vertically on demand in seconds to handle large bursts of data traffic. We are Push Technology’s first go to market cloud provider due to the unique capabilities of Telefonica.

Now some fair warning – we’re going to get pretty technical with this blog post…

I wanted to talk a little more in detail about why this partnership matters and about Push Technology. Push Technology, quite simply, makes data move really, really fast on the Internet, regardless of network conditions and end devices. This is important for a growing variety of sectors where speed is of the essence in engaging users and making money. For example, in online betting applications, in order to place bets during live matches or events, the application has to respond lightning fast to keep up with information broadcast over radio or television channels.

In financial information, traders use algorithmic high-frequency trading platforms that make money off of millisecond differences in execution times and arbitrages so fleeting that humans could never see the window of opportunity.

Push Technology’s customers include most of Europe’s major gaming companies, such as BetFair, Bet365, and Racing Post, and some of the largest trading and financial services companies, including Tradition. This is fabulous for Telefonica and Push Technology, as we both have strong capabilities to service large enterprise customers moving vast amounts of data and requiring very strict SLAs.

A bit more detail about what their software does is in order. It’s technology which uses both a highly-optimized Java message broker and data distribution engine, which then analyzes running Web applications and identifies which types of data need to be frequently updated and accelerated to deliver the best user experience.

Their servers then ensure that the bi-directional flow of those specifically important bits and bytes travel as fast as possible to and from its servers. For Web publishers and developers, Push Technology automatically takes into account both application and device platform differences and dependencies.

So a Web publisher and their coders no longer needs to worry about refactoring code to deliver the same performance to any device, or to change their code base to make it fit the needs of the message broker and data services engine. A simple API and underlying translation layers makes Push Technology “write once-work on everything.”

To date, it has been largely an on-premise solution. But Push Technology saw many of its customers asking about cloud-based solutions in order to address wide swings in demand. Betting houses, for example, see huge spikes on weekends and on game evenings while financial services companies see peaks at opening and closing bells of trading sessions but almost no traffic at night. Mapping this type of dynamic demand back to static hardware is hard and requires massive over-provisioning of hardware.

This is the reason why a cloud solution could both reduce Capex for enterprises and improve performance by connecting directly into the backbone of the Internet and ensuring the highest rates of uptime. Push Technology also sought out Telefonica because of the low latency of our Joyent-powered cloud product, the residency of our data center in London (close to many of their customers and in the sweet spot for data sovereignty issues) and because of our plans to expand into Latin America. Having a global fiber network was also attractive to Push Technology. Owning the fiber just makes it that much easier to get best-in-class data delivery.

The key takeaway benefits include:

● Significant reduction in data consumption while improving quality of service

● Connected to Telefónica’s global fiber network which offers the performance and bandwidth needed for your most demanding mobile and web based applications

● Highly scalable cloud based solutions that can support millions of connected users and devices, provision within milliseconds during peaks or seasonal business

● Offer low cost, high performance while serving more connected users with less infrastructure

● Provide a highly responsive Web and mobile service to support an improved user experience

● Remove CAPEX fixed costs by only paying for the cloud resources you use

● Diffusion Enterprise Cloud is a 100% visible cloud offering so you know exactly where your solution is deployed, on what node and in what country avoiding data sovereignty issues

We hope you’ll check out Push Technology’s Cloud service and give it a spin. We are confident you will find the performance to be unparalleled. If you have questions, contact Telefonica or Push Technology. We work closely together. And stay tuned for more innovations from Telefonica Digital.

 

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