Microsoft and NYU put cat amongst CDN Pigeons

Picked up via Data Centre Knowledge: “Akamai, Limelight Both Object to CDN Study” it looks like some NYU / Microsoft researchers have put the winds up Akamai and Limelight. The origional paper (at http://research.microsoft.com/~chengh/papers/cdn-IMC08.pdf) seems to be missing in action (but still shows up in their search results http://research.microsoft.com/search/search.aspx?qu=CDN).

CDNs have become the defacto method for delivering high volumes of content over the net, and if you distribute lots of data around the world, you should probably be using one. The challenge is that there are rather a lot to choose from right now, which made the report an interesting read. However, Akamai’s reponse (here) and Limelight’s (here) provide a lot of useful insight in choosing a CDN - and are actually more content rich than the original paper. Worth a read if you are in the space.