The high-performance content delivery vendor Varnish Software has joined the NetApp Alliance Partner Programme. Varnish will extend the capabilities of NetApp’s software-defined StorageGRID through the use of Edge Computing – increasing customers’ download speeds by up to 5,000%.
Varnish Software will deliver its caching technology to StorageGRID, which will be used to federate S3 queries across a global multisite StorageGRID architecture. In testing average download speeds increased 50-fold, which has the potential to deliver huge efficiencies for organisations that manage large amounts of data – such as media and entertainment companies.
Lars Larsson, CEO of Varnish Software, commented that the results the companies had seen from the alliance were very promising. “By combining our technical expertise to bring increased speed to customers they, in turn, will be able to accelerate productivity across globally-dispersed teams and bolster bottom-line results.”
Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) allows Varnish to add Edge logic to StorageGRID, in order to expand its functionality for organisations without modifying the user experience for existing customers. Varnish Software will self-discover each StorageGRID site along with its contents, unify the content index, and then route client traffic back to any site based on the S3 bucket being used. This Edge-logic layer will be used for Varnish’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) which allows customers to inspect their HTTP traffic and detect malicious requests at the Edge before they reach the web application. Edge logic will also be used for service integration, traffic auditing, download error correction, and enhanced content security.
“Customers have been able to deliver the performance of StorageGRID to the most remote Edge sites through this collaboration with Varnish Software,” commented Duncan Moore, Senior Director of Product Management at NetApp. “We’re excited to see how customers utilise the solution to bring extreme performance to their next-generation object workloads wherever it’s required to gain competitive advantage.”