Enterprise Features

Profile: Superlumin – Bandwidth Optimization, Content Caching and Application Acceleration Software

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SuperLumin was founded by a group of veteran engineers from high-tech companies including Novell, Cisco, Volera and Arroyo. During this time, it was evident that video was the new bandwidth driver in the Internet. Current proxy technology had aged and shifted solely to a proxy-as-security technology rather than proxy-as-caching technology. Legacy proxies were not capable of providing the bandwidth savings needed through intelligent media caching.

Since SuperLumin was formed, media usage has drastically increased. Social media (YouTube, Facebook etc.) dominates corporate bandwidth throughout various institutions.
Social media sites have also complicated matters with complex distribution models built to distribute regional data loads. SuperLumin was the first company to identify the problem and provide a solution with its Nemesis product.

Media continues to be the driving force as the popularity of social media sites continue to rise, along with the increased usage of high definition corporate video for sales, marketing and training. SuperLumin is uniquely positioned to provide immense bandwidth savings, as well as provide the security features legacy proxies supply.

Today, I’ll be interviewing Paula Polei, who is the Marketing Director for STRATACACHE, makers of SuperLumin

How do SuperLumin’s products help improve overall bandwidth usage? What are some of the key benefits that customers can expect from using your product?

There are numerous answers to this question, depending on who the customer is.

SuperLumin Nemesis starts with caching of traditional Web traffic and builds from there. In the past, Web objects were relatively small, as were access speeds.

Over time, Internet access speeds have increased for corporate networks, while the social networking “menace” was building largely outside corporate firewalls. The effective value of traditional Web caching was marginalized to some extent until the rise of social media changed the rules.

For institutions that find it difficult or undesirable to block access to Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites, the advantages of Web caches are significant. This is especially true with SuperLumin Nemesis, in that it is highly scalable and optimized to handle large video streams and other bulky object types that social media users are so accustomed to consuming.

The other key benefit applies to organizations that require seamless access control to Internet content and robust reporting for legal or corporate compliance.

SuperLumin Nemesis includes a module for Windows clients that transparently authenticates users to the proxy server. Users are allowed or denied access to sites based on user-defined policies. The current version, as a direct replacement for Novell’s BorderManager product, supports this feature for eDIrectory environments. We will support Active Directory and NTLM authentication in the version expected to ship in January, 2011.

How have the recent Internet technologies like YouTube, Social Media, AJAX and SaaS affected corporate bandwidth requirements?

You’ve listed the very technologies that are helping users consume every bit of bandwidth that is made available to them. YouTube and social media, of course, have the highest potential to impact bandwidth usage. Corporate use of these services has begun and is slowly rising as commercial entities recognize the available business value.

Many organizations will fight the good fight to keep that traffic off of their networks but, gradually, more and more of these organizations will find it very hard to say no as the “YouYube generation” continues to dominate the workforce.

AJAX and SaaS are examples of technologies with clearer business value that are measurably raising corporate bandwidth requirements. Business processes that depend on these technologies must be accommodated, while being protected from the larger threat that is social media.

We see the internal corporate use of streaming video, predominantly using Silverlight, as having a much larger real and potential impact on corporate network bandwidth requirements. Nemesis proxy servers minimize this impact by caching the Silverlight streams at WAN endpoints for local distribution. This intelligent distribution technology makes it possible for organizations to use video for training and corporate communication when the infrastructure costs would otherwise be prohibitively high.

More and more of our customers are telling us that the days of “just buying bigger pipes” for private networks and Internet access are history. They want tools to leverage and manage their existing infrastructure.

What are some of the key contributors to “network bloat” for business networks?

As described above, growing identification of business value associated with social media and the internal use of video technologies such as Silverlight are the biggest drivers of increased bandwidth requirements for business. Technologies like AJAX and SaaS are having an impact too, but the challenges they present pale in comparison.

What should companies look for when evaluating caching bandwidth optimization packages?

There is a laundry list…

• How do you see social media being used in and by your business in the next five years?
• How will your business use video technologies in the next five years?
• What are your obligations for legal compliance and corporate governance?
• What are your expected costs to add the public and private bandwidth to keep pace with business requirements?
• Does increased usage of public and private media create opportunities for competitive advantage?
• Can the proposed solution scale to meet your current and future needs?

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