A collaborative initiative joining Varnish Software, Intel and Supermicro helps broadcasters, telcos and CSPs forecast and optimize content delivery energy consumption.

Today’s Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) need to be fast and energy efficient. In tests with Intel Xeon CPU-based servers, Varnish demonstrates performance and power efficiency scalability for two real-world use cases at four deployment sizes with a maximum throughput of 1.2 Tbps.

The outstanding achievements – including up to 1.18 Gbps per watt for live streaming and 0.73 Gbps per watt for VOD – are detailed in a new whitepaper released by Intel. The whitepaper includes research into the scalability of CDN edge node performance and energy efficiency across four different performance levels and builds on the ongoing collaboration and previous significant achievement set by Varnish, Intel and Supermicro earlier this year.

According to the whitepaper, “the fast-growing global content delivery network (CDN) services market size was $19.65 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $105.5 billion in 2032, a compound annual growth rate of 18%. This growth is driven by the success of cloud services and streaming media services both of which experienced great growth in recent years. With this rate of growth, CDNs must increase performance to meet demand while remaining affordable and improving energy efficiency.”

To deliver these services, the document reveals, “ takes a CDN infrastructure with a nationwide network of content caching servers in the cloud and at network points of presence (PoPs), base stations and other network edge locations.”

The conclusions are evident: as this network grows so does its electricity consumption. According to the 2021 Carbon Trust report, one hour of video streaming emits between 50-60g of Co2. While that amount is lower than driving a car, reducing the impact of CDN services can have a significant impact on the environment due to the large size of the market. For this reason, CDN services providers are looking at ways to reduce their CDN energy consumption. We are measuring and reporting energy consumption in this paper, since associated energy costs and carbon emissions will vary greatly.”

“As content delivery becomes more of a strategic function that organizations are bringing in house, benchmarks like these will help them understand what is needed to achieve sustainability goals and objectives,” said Frank Miller, CTO of Varnish Software.  “The need to deliver more throughput with less energy and at the lowest cost has never been greater.”

The latest benchmarks were accomplished using Varnish Enterprise 6.0 content delivery software deployed on Supermicro Superserver powered by Intel Xeon D, and CloudDC and Hyper 1RU/2RU servers powered by Intel 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs without the use of specialized, added-cost TLS offload cards.

According to Varnish Software, the configurations selected for these tests demonstrated excellent efficiency over a wide range of performance levels and power budgets and illustrate what is possible with commercially available software and well-configured broadly available Intel based servers, without the use of accelerators that add cost.

To learn more about these latest benchmarks, download the full Whitepaper here.