Mitch Tulloch is a seven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional MVP award and widely recognized expert on Windows administration, deployment and virtualization. For more tips by Mitch you can follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook. Home » Networking » How transparent caching works. He has written more than a thousand articles and has authored or been series editor for over 50 books for Microsoft Press and other publishers.
He currently runs an IT content development business in Winnipeg, Canada. Your email address will not be published. Learn about the latest security threats, system optimization tricks, and the hottest new technologies in the industry. Based on projected numbers, some of which place video content at over ninety per cent of all internet traffic by , service providers have begun to look in earnest at a number of solutions that allow video content viewing without tying up precious backhaul data pipes.
One proposed solution that's finding traction is the concept of transparent caching. The idea has merit, for two key reasons, and we expect it to grow in use over the next few years. The term caching refers to storing objects in a group, ideally close to the need for that object, in much the same way that an Amazon warehouse would store hundreds of Kindle Fire tablets in each of several warehouses around the country—anticipating sales of the tablet would occur within a few hours' delivery of each warehouse.
In the computing world, caching is similar, but with a twist: A copy of a file is stored locally, or at least closer to the end-user device, so that it is available for re-use. The re-use part is key to understanding transparent caching. It's certainly feasible to cache all video content at the edge, very close to each user, and that is the business model for at least one large content delivery network CDN.
It works for premium content, such as television shows or movies, but the idea of edge caching all video content on the web—on the off chance that all of the content will be viewed in equal percentages—is neither practical or financially viable. Still, there's a need to balance between caching just a small amount of content at the edge and caching it all.
That's where the transparent part comes in. The idea is to set business rules that automate the process of moving content from the network core to the network edge, without requiring human intervention for any specific video file. Doing so allows the edge cache to refresh itself, based on changes in viewing preferences on a much more granular level than could be accomplished by even a large group of human operators.
To both the end user, whose video starts faster, and the network operator, who doesn't have popular video constantly traversing the network, the idea of transparent caching holds promise. So what are the two key reasons that transparent caching holds merit? First, it's been around for quite some time; second, streaming is moving towards a model that enhances the benefits of transparent caching.
In the early days, caching was the sole domain of website hosting and serving. Content could be cached at a local computer, in the form of cookies or images, and most users understand the idea of "clearing the cache" to make sure the most recent content is available for their browsers.
Caching devices on the ISP's network also held the more popular sites, such as news sites, but those caches also had to be frequently cleared to keep headline stories fresh. The one area that caching didn't really work well with was dynamic content. Think of a webpage like Kayak. General information about how to configure new Offline Files feature For more information about software update terminology, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:.
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