UltraBand 5000

Product Overview


The UltraBand 5000 is a large-scale video caching platform for broadband access networks. The UltraBand reduces bandwidth and network infrastructure costs, and improves end-user Quality of Experience (QoE), by caching P2P and HTTP content objects delivered to broadband subscribers.

HTTP and P2P video applications represent over two thirds of today’s consumer Internet bandwidth. Internet video traffic is growing at unprecedented rates and is driving network costs up . Transit links, peering links and access network links wastefully transport the same content objects over and over.

The UltraBand product line cost-effectively scales to meet the needs of virtually any provider – from small-scale network locations with a few thousand subscribers to large-scale network locations aggregating over a million subscribers.

The UltraBand 5000 helps service providers reduce the impact of Internet video applications, file sharing and downloads on costly Internet backhaul links, enabling service providers to enhance service margins, improve subscriber satisfaction and retention, and open up capacity for new revenue opportunities,.

The UltraBand 5000 delivers an extensive set of media caching, video acceleration, and content control capabilities including concurrent HTTP and P2P caching with flexible configuration options, IP transparency, and rich content filtering and control.

Network Deployment

The UltraBand is deployed in network service provider network in conjunction with a network element that is responsible for redirection of cacheable traffic classes to the cache, using L4 or L7 traffic classification.

The UltraBand is a network cache, which transparently intermediates delivery of Internet content to the subscriber from Internet content sources. The deployment of the cache in ISP network doesn’t affect Internet application behavior and doesn’t require configuration change on the subscriber side.

Clustered Caching Platform

The UltraBand 5000 leverages clustering to achieve solution scalability that is mandatory to support large-scale and rapidly growing multi-gigabit carrier networks.
UltraBand clustering architecture includes interchangeable cache engines. Each cache engine supports caching of all protocols and services, and can access all content available in the system.

The cache engine interchangeability provides M+N cache engine redundancy and enables advanced fault tolerance features, such as hitless in-service software upgrades.

The clustered caching platform utilizes SAN-based storage architecture, allowing separately scaling of storage capacity and system throughput, and adopting best enterprise storage management practices.

As all cache engines are able to see all content stored in the cache, the system is able to pool resources dynamically as needed and prevents creation of storage hotspots.
 

 
The UltraBand utilizes a proprietary clustered file system to enable sharing of the SAN-based storage. The clustered file system can operate seamlessly over multiple SAN storage arrays and is optimized for video caching requirements, including support of very large multi-part content objects, large-scale I/O and random I/O access patterns.

Caching

UltraBand platform is based on high-performance caching engine capable of supporting up to 1.25Gbps of throughput and 500,000 concurrent sessions. Same UltraBand caching engine supports multiple HTTP services and P2P protocols.
As the traffic mix in Internet access networks shifts from pre-dominantly interactive HTTP traffic in peak time to bulk P2P traffic in the off-peak traffic, same cache engine is capable of supporting both traffic classes, resulting in optimized utilization of the caching resources and reduced solution footprint.

Scalability

As depicted in the diagram below, the UltraBand product line seamlessly scales from a single cache engine to up to sixteen cache engines. Up to ten storage array enclosures function as a single SAN-based storage layer providing a total caching storage capacity of 60TB.
UltraBand offers an upgrade path from UB5000-10 configuration up to UB5000-100 configuration, allowing the operator to scale the UltraBand caching system in lock-step with network growth.
 

UB5000 Standard Configurations
 


Manageability

A carrier-class solution, the UltraBand 5000 satisfies stringent ISP reliability and manageability requirements. The highly available platform supports M+N cache server load balancing and redundancy, optional RAID mirroring for storage arrays, hot-swappable power supplies and disks, software and hardware watchdog functions, and non-disruptive software upgrades.

The solution incorporates dedicated management server that offers a comprehensive management view of all solution components, including system configuration, monitoring of KPIs and resource utilization, management, reporting and alerting.
PeerApp Performance
  "With PeerApp we need half the caching hardware we would need if we use other caching appliances. And by supporting the most protocols and services, the UltraBand is able to produce more bandwidth savings for the same amount of traffic.

Perhaps most importantly, our users clearly notice that YouTube no longer waits to buffer the video."

Mishary Al-Faris
Enterprise Solutions Manager, Qualitynet - Kuwait