Blackwave Targets CDNs for Video Delivery

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, June 9. 2009 at 04:50 PM EDT Post a comment

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It's been a busy day for storage and media delivery vendor Blackwave Inc., which released its first production unit, the Blackwave R6, this morning, and announced CDNetworks Co. Ltd. as its first customer.

With its new Blackwave R6, the company allows content delivery networks (CDNs) to serve massive amounts of video in multiple formats, the company says. The R6 supports HTTP video delivery, as well as Windows Media and Adobe Flash file formats.

Blackwave CTO Mike Kilian says the company's secret sauce is in its ability to generate consistently high read rates at the disk level, allowing the R6 to deliver more video, faster, to end users.

"Instead of three racks of equipment, we can serve the same amount of video with half a rack," Kilian says.

Apparently the performance increase was enough to nab CDNetworks as a customer. According to Kilian, CDNetworks began deploying Blackwave infrastructure in its network shortly after the products became generally available in January.

Blackwave joins an increasing number of technology vendors selling optimized storage and video solutions to CDNs and other video delivery companies.

Nokeena Networks Inc. recently came out of stealth mode with a software appliance that is designed to serve up video at massive scale from any off-the-shelf x86-based machine. And Arista Networks Inc. reportedly sells the hardware that allows BitGravity Inc. to serve up its video so fast.

While Blackwave has positioned itself as a vendor to CDNs, the company says its addressable market is bigger than just trying to serve to companies like CDNetworks.

"Our focus is on CDNs, but we're also finding marketplace traction with content aggregators, with companies like Hulu and the YouTube," Kilian says.