“We have entered a new era of CDN cache performance,” declared Frank Miller, CTO at Varnish Software, when his company demonstrated its breakthrough speed/power capabilities at NAB Show this month. Varnish has achieved greater than 1.3 Tbps throughput on a single Edge server consuming approximately 1,120 watts, resulting in 1.17 Gbps per Watt. This new benchmark was accomplished in collaboration with Intel and Supermicro and will help the content delivery industry, including live sports streamers, improve economics and sustainability.
“Achieving over 1 Tbps in a single Edge server is a major leap forward for the industry, and critical for delivering the next generation of video and digital experiences,” Miller continued. “The need to deliver more throughput with less energy and at the lowest cost is growing exponentially.”
The speed/power boost is possible with commercially available software and off-the-shelf server hardware from Supermicro which is built on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. “Varnish Software’s unique architecture, features and capabilities were essential in reaching the new benchmarks, which include asynchronous direct I/O, NUMA awareness and software-based TLS,” Miller notes.
Varnish Enterprise 6.0 was deployed on a Supermicro 2U Hyper server (powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors) to achieve the speed/power breakthrough. There was no need for specialised, added-cost TLS offload cards. Varnish points out that the throughput and energy efficiencies outlined at NAB Show can be applied to a broad range of servers depending on customer requirements.