SSDs are very different compared to the traditional hard disk drives in terms of how they write or retrieve data on microchips.

Advantages of SSD’s:

• There are no moving heads or spinning disks which results in faster random access of data because there is no “Seeking Motion” as required in HDD’s
• Consistent read performance because physical location of data is irrelevant for SSDs.
• Lack of moving parts provides higher mechanical reliability, lower power consumption and emits less heat than HDD’s.

SSD’s in the servers will allow customers to have faster file operations, ultimately speeding up our Content Delivery Solutions even further. With NetDNA you can always be assured that we will be quick to react to new technology changes and always pass on any network architecture savings and benefits back to our loyal customers.

With this partnership, we plan to offer the most affordable and easiest to use video and audio delivery platform around the globe. With the launch of HDDN.com video-focused brand, we have taken a giant leap into the streaming media market by offering high quality, competitively priced packages to serve high definition content through its dedicated high-speed distribution network. Because of how versatile each Wowza Media Server is, it allows us to take advantage of its full content delivery footprint around the globe utilizing the NetDNA Anycast DNS network for intelligent packet routing as well as integration between the Wowza API and the custom NetDNA API for improved customer implementation and setup.

About Wowza Media Systems
Wowza Media Systems is the media server software company that provides an industrial strength infrastructure for live video, video-on-demand, live recording and video chat. For more information, visit Wowza Media Systems at www.wowzamedia.com.

The improvements in this release allow us to be even more flexible then we where before.

New Features:

Custom Domains: From now on you are able to have  7 Custom Domains per Pull or Push Zone. On request we can provide you as many Custom Domains as you need.

Wildcards for Custom Domains: We developed a way to enable  wild cards for on Custom Domains, to help you to integrate your project even easier with our Content Delivery Network.

Content Disposition: Using this new feature, you can force a zone to have all files in it automatically downloaded (such as movies that the user should download and not stream). When enabled the Content Disposition Feature will set the modify the http header and force all files to behave as if the end-user chose the save as dialog. You will find this feature under the Advanced Zone Settings.

Automatic Secure Token Setup: It allows you to Setup a Secure VOD Zone just as easy as a normal Video on Demand Zone. This feature is only available on our Video Solution HDDN.com.

Bug Fixes:

UI issue on the popular files export report.

If you have any questions or feedback of any kind please contact us.

This is mainly a backend update that has included code cleanups and backend changes so our support and sales staff can support our clients better.

There are no visible changes that you will notice inside of the control panel itself, but rest assured, there was an update and the version number didn’t just miraculously change

The following are the new features / bug fixes that were included in this release:

New Features

• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to enable / disable the Query String caching
• [Push Zone] Added the ability to control the expires headers
• [VOD Zone] Added a feature to the VOD debug tool to debug secure streams
• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to manage the Origin IP when it is changed
• [Pull Zone] Added the ability to to view the header information to the Cache Inspector
• [All Zones] Added the ability to specify date ranges in graphs
• [Pull Zone / Push Zone] Added the ability to accept wildcard’s in the HTTP Referrer Protection
• [All Zones] Added the cache hits % and month to date hits to graphs.

Bug Fixes

• [All Zones] Fixed an issue with the cache hits by hour not reporting correctly in all cases
• [Pull Zone] Fixed an issue where the Origin IP was not updated when the Origin URL was changed

Have fun with it and let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

The following are the new features / bug fixes that were released in this version.

New Features

• [Pull Zone / Push Zone] Added valid referrers for zones to prevent hot-linking under advanced options.
• [Push Zone] Added functionality to turn on gzip compression
• [Pull Zone] Added a cache inspector to verify all edges have the most updated file cached
• [VOD Zone] Added a debug to test a file from all edge locations directly

Bug Fixes

• [Push Zone] Changed text for Push Zone replication time to reflect current replication times.
• [Pull Zone / Push Zone / VOD Zone] Fixed a bug with the transfer per day and node hit graphs.
• [Pull Zone] Fixed an erroneous error message for Purge Cache
• [Login] Cleared up error when invalid login was use

Have fun and let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

1. Updated API Documentation (in the Support section)

2. Some customers reported slowness in our control panel after the 1.4 release. We’ve made some changes to prevent these issues.

– optimized slow queries for the following methods (14 seconds was reduced to around 2 seconds) for the “Most Popular Files” graphs and widgets
– added client side caching for minified js and css files

Don’t hesitate to share any feedback with us.

A special thanks to Bryan, Billy and Steve for this release.

• Activity Viewer: Latest control panel activity viewer.
• Video Debugger: See videos per PoP
• Default Compression File types changed:  Added “Application/Javascript” to the default Pull Zone compression list.

Full list:

• Fixed occasional zend error message showing up at the bottom when creating a push/vod zone
• Fixed push zone renaming to properly update dns
• Added Last Activity
• New Service Updates layout (lists last 5 updates)
• New button style and some minor css enhancements
• Some UI theme refinements
• New VOD debug tool
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on pull zone list
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage pull zone
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on push zone list
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage push zone
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on vod zone list
• Preloaded and Ajaxified create new zone on manage vod zone
• Refactored passwordmeter.js into a jquery plugin to support multiple password meters on one page
• Updated all templates with password meters to use the jquery plugin
• Added Live Zone listing and portal page
• Css/Js minification for speed increases on the control panel
• added “View all reports” button icon on zone portal
• added “View all reports” button icon on dashboard reports widget
• Completed the Edit API key section
• Toggle on/off compression on pull zone portal
• In-place ajax-loader icon
• took out the depency on jquery.blockUI plugin and created a custom ajax notifier plugin with the help of jquerytools which is easier to configure. This one easily supports ajax loading icons and custom messages.
• updated all ajax notifiers on these pages
• added ajax icon while loading rss feeds
• added min-height on files list on dashboard and manage pages so files tab won’t be smaller when there are no files to list
• moved today’s transfer to a new column on Zone listing pages
• made totals row height bigger on pull/push/vod lists
• removed origin url column on pull zone
• added success/provisioning error messages for:
  • Pull Zone basic info update
  • Pull Zone custom domain update
  • Push Zone basic info update
  • Push Zone custom domain update
  • VOD Zone update
• fixed javascript in adding of custom domains in pull zones and push zones
• added external link icon for external links under pull zone and push zone listing
• Updated content-type list for compression to include “Application/Javascript”

Enjoy!  Please contact us with any feedback.

Today, the Control Panel v1.3 is released. Among the new features:

• Multi Hostname in Pull Zones – as directed by yslow, we now allow easy addition  hostnames on the same Pull Zone.
• Reporting Updates – added a reporting dashboard, more links to Zone stats
• New FAQs – We’ve started a new wiki for FAQs that we will
• U/I Refinements – added inline editing, VOD Portal Page, Push Zone Portal Page
• More:- Bug fixes and Improvements (listed below)

Multi Hostname in Pull & Push Zones

According to Yahoo’s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website”, splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you’re using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org

For more information check “Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane” by Tenni Theurer and Patty Chi.

Here is a screenshot of the new feature in your control panel.  To get to this, click on any Pull Zone you’ve created from the Dashboard:

Reporting Updates

There is a new reporting dashboard that gives you an overview of all your zones, or an individual zone by any date range.  Here is a screenshot of the new Reporting Dashboard:

Also available on the Main dashboard is a button for “reports” which allows you to jump right into a customized reporting dashboard for each individual zone:

U/I Refinements:

There are a series of U/I refinements, particularly in and around managing individual Pull Zones and VOD Zones.  There are now more clear instructions on how to connect,  zone specific stats and a spot to manage multiple CNames (as mentioned above).  Here is a screenshot of the Manage Pull Zone page:

FAQs:

We’ve launched a new FAQs section.

To get to it, click on “Support” from the main navigation in your control panel.

Please feel free to post any FAQs in the comments of this blog, and we will ad them.

Full Lists of fixes and improvements:

*  Reporting page to be reformatted to have graphs again
*  Edit Pull Zone Redesign (Added inline edits)
*  VOD Zone Creation Instructions Update (added more info popup)
*  Better Error Messaging on Pull Zone Creation
*  All zone names must be 16char or less
*  U/I Changes – remove multicolored “Push” “Pull”, etc buttons from the main listings
*  Navigation now only has the current headings options
*  Put more instructions in Push Bucket Help (added more info popup)
*  Put in new FAQs
*  Removed the text “Navigation Menu” from the top left menu
*  Made rows clickable on zone lists
*  Better graphs (now shows more accurate stats and “knows” days with 0 data)
*  Added failed login email sending
*  Show invited users
*  Add Push Zone and VOD Zone “Portal” Pages
*  Live Zone Stats

Version 1.3 couldn’t have been done with out your feedback. Please keep it coming and we will do our best to get your feature requests into version 1.4.

Cheers!