FastSoft Steps Into the Limelight

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, November 17. 2008 at 02:15 PM EST Post a comment

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FastSoft Inc. nabbed a new customer this morning, with the announcement that Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) will be deploying its E Series Internet accelerators to speed up large file delivery.

The news comes as some validation for FastSoft's strategy of targeting content delivery networks (CDNs) by offering them a way to speed up large file delivery with its FastTCP technology. FastTCP increases the performance of large file transfers with advanced algorithms that react to network slowdowns more quickly and elegantly than traditional TCP file transfers.

"We always thought our technology was widely extensible to a number of different industries," says Dan Henderson, vice president of marketing at FastSoft. The company has a number of customers in media and entertainment that use its Internet acceleration devices for some applications like transfers of large files to post-production facilities.

But Henderson says the company believes the technology is applicable for "companies that distribute content on behalf of other people" -- like, for instance, CDNs.

Note that Limelight is not deploying the technology to accelerate file transfers to consumers, but instead will deploy FastSoft's E Series Internet accelerators to accelerate ingest to the CDN itself.

"As library sizes get bigger, it takes longer to get onto the CDN," says Paul Alfieri, Limelight's director of corporate communications. As a result, Limelight hopes to speed the process of transferring files to its storage servers by deploying the technology.

While helping its existing customers to move content onto the CDN, Alfieri says the move could also help to ramp new customers onto its network, particularly if they're large media properties with lots of content already available on the Internet. 

FastSoft's FastTCP technology is being used to speed the delivery of content to different storage servers within the Limelight network, but there's some question of whether the technology could be extended to speed delivery of content even further, perhaps to the end user.

Alfieri wouldn't rule out the possibility, but said the company has no current plans to use FastSoft's technology in that way. "Our network is incredibly complex and the technology has never been tested with the scale of a CDN like ours," he says.