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Yottaa CEO Coach Wei.

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup which aims to speed up website performance, netted $9 million in Series B funding from initial investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures as well as some new-but-unnamed backers. That brings total venture funding to $13 million for the two-year-old company.

Yottaa, which offers both website performance optimization and security services, targets both small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises. SMBs often don’t do a lot to speed up their website performance simply because many of the available solutions — from Cisco or F5 Networks — are too pricey or difficult to implement, according to Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “In SMBs, we compete with ‘do nothing,’” Wei said in an interview Monday.

In enterprises, it faces off against traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) from Akamai and Limelight. As GigaOM reported last spring, Yottaa uses third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services to deliver its optimization services.

The new funding will help the company — which already claims good customer momentum — build more. Since Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer launched in October, 2011, the company’s site has drawn 100 million unique visitors. Some 80,000 web sites have used Yottaa’s services to date, Wei said. Under the company’s freemium model — site monitoring is free but optimization and security services are not . Yottaa does not disclose how many customers are paying.

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Case in point: Yottaa. The web-optimization startup, which also launched its own CDN service in March, is transitioning its network into a hybrid model of cloud-based and physical servers after launching in the cloud exclusively. It’s a significant shift considering the company was actually a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge and touted its cloud-based approach when the company launched last April.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud-only model has served Yottaa well. Its network is actually spread across multiple providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Voxel, and that distribution helped the company reroute traffic to avoid any major downtime during last year’s four-day AWS outage. And even as it moves to a hybrid model, the cloud still has benefits. “We can literally scale to hundreds of thousands of machines in a matter of hours,” said Yottaa Founder and CEO Coach Wei.

As the company grew, however, cost, performance and security issues meant Yottaa had to decrease its cloud dependency:

• Cost: According Wei, it’s easy to get started in the cloud — you can spin up only as many servers as you need at any given time and don’t have to invest in 100,000 physical servers to match Akamai’s architecture — but “when you get to a certain scale, it’s actually not cost-effective anymore.” For Yottaa, which is serving 100 million unique visitors across its network every month for more than 80,000 web sites, that time has already come. Actually, Wei said, Yottaa always planned to move to a hybrid architecture, but even still he was surprised at how much the cloud could cost. Before he started Yottaa, he’d never thought about paying a million dollars a year to AWS.
• Performance: The performance trade-offs in the cloud can be problematic, too. Wei said network performance is the biggest problem for Yottaa, as it’s typically about 50 percent slower in the cloud and variable at that. You never know what type of performance you’ll get at any given time. If someone else is using a lot of bandwidth, your service might suffer. And while some cloud providers throttle bandwidth at 100 Mbps per user, Wei said, “at the high end of the scale, that’s just way too low.”
• Security: Wei notes all sorts of security problems with cloud computing, but the major one is the inability to use tried-and-true physical appliances for security. Not only do physical appliances provide a lot in terms of traffic-monitoring and load-balancing, but they can store thousands of IP addresses for SSL certificates on a single box. A cloud provider, Wei said, might only give you a handful of IP addresses.

With its new hybrid model, Yottaa still leverages the cloud when necessary — like when it would be faster serving an Australian end-user through a cloud provider there than a physical server in the United States — but it targets physical resources whenever possible. Its network now includes cloud and/or physical servers in 24 cities across the globe.

Yottaa isn’t alone in its transition to a hybrid architecture after a cloud-heavy beginning. Zynga, for one, famously reversed its AWS-to-internal-cloud usage ratio from 80-20 to 20-80. Fellow gaming startup Digital Chocolate also moved a good portion of its operations back onto internal infrastructure. At a larger scale, you see similar requirements of cost, performance and customization driving web platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to build their own data centers.

Of course, for every company (or several companies) that decides to switch from a cloud-centric architecture, there’s a Netflix or Animoto that decides to stay all in the cloud. It’s really a matter of knowing what’s best for your business. We’ll talk all about ideal infrastructure choices at our Structure conference in June, which includes top executives from Zynga, Amazon and Netflix among others.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Claveirole.

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Update: Here’s a taste of Cedexis’ dashboard showing cloud provider stats:

Cedexis was founded in 2009 by two Akamai veterans to help businesses choose the best clouds and CDNs for their needs on a dynamic basis. If there’s an outage or slowdown on one cloud, the Cedexis service can move that workload elsewhere. One customer saw 40 percent page-load improvement just by using Cedexis for network optimization — and this was a sophisticated customer that was already using advanced cloud and CDN technologies, said Cedexis co-founder Julien Coulon.

For the report, Cedexis collects data from a few hundred customers that embed a piece of JavaScript code on their websites. Cedexis aggregates data  ”about the performance, errors, throughputs from every network in the world, putting it out in a way to help them choose which [cloud or CDN] they should work with,” Coulon said via phone from the company’s Paris office. “This is real data from real end users who need to see what’s happening. And we’re doing this transparently in a way that helps the cloud and CDN providers improve their quality of service.”

“No provider is good everywhere, all the time, for all users, but if you mix them right you can get significant improvement in your web site performance,” Coulon said.

Cedexis sells its service to large content providers, including French media companies Canal+ and FranceTelevisions and luxury consumer products makers Dior and Piaget. U.S.-based customers include Mozilla. On the monitoring side, Cedexis competes with Compuware’s Gomez  and Keynote Systems. On the network load-balancing side, it vies with companies like F5 Networks.

Amazon is the cloud giant that most companies evaluate when they want to make a move, but the company doesn’t provide a ton of insight into its inner workings.  While some might think that Amazon and Akamai, the CDN leader, might take umbrage to  statistics that might show them in a less-than-stellar light, tools like this could also help them to improve their services. Amazon, which suffered a serious outage last year which Cedexis profiled here, might also welcome the opportunity to show more about its performance, going forward, as more competition from the OpenStack players comes online.

Update: And with that, here’s another taste of the Cedexis data, this time on CDNs:

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After spending the last decade developing products for these ISPs and hearing firsthand the challenges they’re experiencing, I founded a new company, Qwilt, at work on a solution I feel will benefit both operators and consumers.

Consider: Americans today watch an average of five hours a day of regular TV (depressing but true). Yet they consume only a few minutes of online video per day. That balance is changing dramatically with the rapid growth of video delivered through Web services like Netflix, HBO-Go, Amazon.com, Facebook, YouTube, Hulu, Xfinity-TV and others. It may not be too long before many of us will be hitting the volume caps set by carriers while consuming legitimate services of this kind.

In five years, we’re going to be watching about an hour a day of online video, according to TDG Research. That’s roughly 16 times more than consumption today. And it implies that Internet networks will need up to 10 times more capacity than they have now to handle the deluge.

What to do? Service providers are obviously not sitting still while this is happening. But their current options are limited. One solution is to simply throw more capacity at the problem — buy more gear from the usual telecom-gear suspects in the hopes that the boxes can handle all the new traffic. This is what many service providers have done so far.

But in many ways that’s a wasteful solution: carriers are still transmitting the same video time after time, again and again across the network every time a new user calls it up. This approach doesn’t take advantage of technology that would streamline this process and allow carriers to cache popular videos and serve them more efficiently. It also cannot scale with the exponential growth of video. Plus, it’s expensive — all that new gear isn’t free.

A second solution is for carriers to build their own content-delivery networks. Some have built internal CDNs to mainly distribute their own content to subscribers. Others have gone further and built “wholesale” CDNs that compete head-to-head with giants like Akamai, Limelight and Level3. Some of the challenges to these approaches, however, include:

• Content providers would rather not deal with dozens of small CDNs to get widespread geographic coverage — today, they deal with just a couple, or even one, to achieve global reach. The content providers we’re speaking with these days tell us that dealing with multiple, small CDNs is an operational headache.
• The economics of CDNs don’t work in favor of small providers. There are economies of scale at play here: the more traffic you bring as a content provider, the better prices you get per bit. So it’s cheaper to concentrate traffic with a smaller number of large CDNs.
• Carriers’ sales teams aren’t skilled at engaging with online content providers. Big guys like Akamai have been doing this for years and have a big advantage.

A third solution for carriers, which attempts to address some of the problems inherent in solution #2, is to create a federation of new CDNs. This would allow content providers like Netflix and YouTube to deal with just one CDN on a commercial level, instead of dozens of smaller ones, even though multiple, regional CDNs would be propagating and distributing the video content for carriers.

This is a nice idea, but it’s far from being a reality. Think about it: It won’t be easy to get operators from different countries, often with competing business objectives and different regulatory frameworks, to work together on a project like this. This doesn’t even take into account the technical challenges of having different content-delivery products made by different vendors, and owned by different carriers, work seamlessly together.

I think there is a better way.

Some new solutions, including Blue Coat and PeerApp, are being developed today that attack the problem through what is known as “transparent caching.” That means inserting a layer of network-optimization technology into networks to help make them more efficient and cut costs — specifically, reducing 60 percent to 80 percent of video traffic on the network.

Given how much video traffic is expected to soar in the coming years, that’s a technology that can make quite an impact in freeing up network resources. In basic terms, this technology temporarily stores popular videos at the edge of the network, so that they can be delivered faster, using less bandwidth, to geographic areas where those videos are in high demand.

This type of technology could be installed by such carriers as Comcast and Verizon to make sure the most popular content they’re transmitting is delivered in the highest quality. For example, let’s assume that the latest Super Bowl video summary is available at www.nfl.com and becomes very popular in New York. Carriers offering this kind of technology would automatically detect the high consumer demand for the video. They would then make any subsequent requests available to viewers from network points close to the various customers’ locations, both improving viewing experience and reducing costs.

There are several upsides to this approach. They include significantly lower costs and also more flexibility for carriers. A transparent video-delivery solution doesn’t require any specific commercial engagements for it to work. It can be used with any type of CDN. Such a system also doesn’t require any changes to existing network IP architectures, modifications to any system or browser settings, any special HTML code or integration with different vendors’ equipment. It’s an intelligent system that could be deployed and managed very easily, almost like a consumer product.

Such a solution has the potential to be a win for the entire video value chain — carriers, content providers, consumers and CDNs. The carriers get a low-cost, easy-to-integrate and flexible solution to deal with the current flood of video traffic. Content providers would have reassurance that their videos would actually get through crowded networks without bumping up against usage caps. (Recently, GigaOM reported that Charter Cable would impose such caps to combat the surge in online video that is overwhelming its network.) Consumers would benefit because they’d be able to see the video they want, in the highest-possible quality, without delays or extra costs. CDNs would also benefit, but that’s a topic for a post of its own.

With today’s technologies and the right algorithms, it is possible to unify real-time network intelligence with high-volume storage and video-delivery capabilities in a very compact, form-factor appliance. These products may then get distributed across the broad edge of carriers’ networks for delivering any form of video at a higher quality and much lower cost for all parties.

What we’ve seen in the last few months is that many carriers worldwide have realized the significant benefits of a transparent video-delivery technology and have started to roll out projects accordingly.

We’ll see how the landscape shakes out this year. As content providers expand their video offerings, delivering more and more bits to networks, it’s becoming critical for carriers to deal with their video-overload challenges.

Alon Maor is the CEO of Qwilt, a startup backed by Redpoint and Accel Partners that is developing new transparent video-delivery technology.

Image courtesy of Flickr user covilha.

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To do so, Cisco first introduced its Videoscape products at last year’s CES. Now the network equipment provider is introducing a series of new products that build on its existing platform. While initial Videoscape products were built to intelligently handle video distribution over the network, the new additions will provide more functionality both for managing assets in the cloud, as well as new client-based technology for a wider range of connected devices.

On the cloud side of things, Cisco is announcing a product called Videoscape Voyager Virtual, which renders a new user interface that can be delivered to legacy set-top boxes. While some operators — most notably Comcast — are producing a massive update to their set-top boxes, there’s still a large installed base of users who won’t get new hardware anytime soon. The Voyager Virtual will let them get more dynamic updates to the programming guide, by delivering that user interface as a channel.

The Cisco Media Processor and Transcode Manager will support delivery to multiple devices with adaptive bit-rate technology automatically. The Cisco Conductor offers up a unified control plane for delivering multiple video services on more devices. And Cisco also provides advanced analytics for both its Content Delivery System customers or for third-party CDNs.

On the client side, Cisco is introducing a new multiscreen gateway that will deliver live, recorded and on-demand video to multiple TV around the home. The gateway has six tuners, meaning it can record up to six video streams all at the same time. Cisco is also introducing a software platform for creating new user interfaces and programming guides. That software stack can also be used to deploy new apps to set-top boxes, including social media applications, streaming video and other features.

This is all really geeky but necessary stuff, and it’s probably attractive for operators to run Cisco software if they’re already Cisco clients as a way to roll out these multiplatform capabilities. In fact, a few already are: Canada’s Rogers Communications, France’s Numéricable and Israel’s YES have all chosen Videoscape components to roll out next-gen video services.

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To satisfy customers, CDNs need to speed downloads and interaction and to make sure web content looks right on itty-bitty screens. Toward that end, Akamai said it will work with NetBiscuits, a small company that specializes in tools that help developers build mobile device-friendly content. The resulting technology will “re-jigger” XML coding so pages will display optimally on any device and be offered as a product or as a service, said Neil Cohen, Akamai VP of global product marketing.

Device proliferation will only continue. In an era of “hyperconnected devices, any device that can be connected is connected,” said Akamai Chief Scientist Tom Leighton. Five years ago, Akamai delivered 3TB of mobile data per day. That number rose to 520TB per day this year, and is projected to hit 91,000TB (or 91 petabytes) per day by 2016.

Akamai and smaller CDN competitors like Limelight  and Edgecast are scrambling to meet the demand for a great mobile computing experience. The scary thing is that smartphones and tablets are just the beginning. More non-PC devices, including household appliances and even garments, will be part of the data scrum going forward. That means more data flowing from more types of devices with all sorts of form factors.

“These devices may be on Ethernet or Wi-Fi or 3G or 4G. [They will be] Refrigerators other appliances. That’s a new challenge for [network] performance,” said Ravi Maira,VP of site acceleration for Akamai.

Maira also spoke generally about a new set of Akamai technologies, code-named “Q”, that  will further optimize content “for the right device at the right time.”

Part of Q’s promise is that it will feed back more information about what the end user actually experiences beyond network metrics: “what they’re seeing in their browser or application so you have a sense of what’s happening and filter it by classes of devices,” Maira said.  The technology is slated to launch in the first half of 2012, but he provided no other details.

In an interview, Cohen said the influx of new devices will spark more challenges and opportunities for CDNs.

“We’ve seen two inflection points: one five years ago when we morphed to handle dynamic real-time transactions, not just the stuff you can cache. Fast forward to today; more than half our revenue is from non-cached things. Where CDNs go next is the world of pervasive connectivity and offloading content, handling dynamic transactions where there will be a different network type, different screen sizes, maybe [a need for] different network optimizations even on the same device,” Cohen said.

Not everyone believes all these new devices will have a huge impact on the state of CDNs, however.

“Remember, CDNs are a value-added and premier service for content. You spend more for network services when that makes sense, and you look for lowest possible costs when that’s okay. Chances are that a lot of the connections for the device explosion won’t require a premier network service,” said Dana Gardner, principal analyst for Interarbor Solutions. “If your refrigerator takes three minutes to talk to your stove, who cares? If you want good HD video, or secure transactions, or private commerce, then add-on services like Akamai provides are de rigueur. So whether the explosion of devices means an explosion of CDN depends on the economics of the connection, and the requirements of the business case. Where it makes sense, it makes sense.”

Image courtesy of Akamai.

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The general workflow, he explained, is that content providers send video to VidLab; VidLab ingests, processes and compresses the files for download on various types of devices; and then VidLab uploads the files to its content delivery network providers, who serve the content to consumers. As one might expect, however, VidLab doesn’t rely solely on IP transport and some hard drives from the local Fry’s to do its job.

Across the Internet

Because VidLab gets video from partners in its uncompressed form, some form of high-speed transport is key to ensure that VidLab actually gets the video in a timely manner. According to Russell, 90 minutes of uncompressed video can be around 80GB in size, which would take at least several hours to upload. Only VidLab doesn’t just get 90-minute movies — Russell said it gets everything from 30-second trailers to 2.5-hour Ultimate Fighting Championship broadcasts.

That’s part of the reason why most of VidLab’s content providers deliver files using Aspera’s high-speed file-transport technology, which Aspera claims can boost upload speeds into the 700-800 Mbps range. Russell added that Aspera has the security features required by Hollywood studios, which don’t like to risk their content being compromised over the network.

On the way out to CDNs, VidLab utilizes a company called Signiant, which provides what it calls “content supply chain management.” Russell explains the technology as automating workflows as files migrate between VidLab’s various systems and ultimately to the CDN. This lets Russell’s team focus on transforming video files without worrying so much about whether the files are where they’re supposed to be at any given time. He said VidLab compresses most files to between 5GB and 10GB and sends them to CDNs at about 200 Mbps, which takes about 20 minutes for a standard file.

Between Servers

But latency isn’t just an issue over the Internet. As I’ve reported before, network latency is also a huge issue when talking about moving big data within a company’s own data center. To tackle this issue, VidLab keeps a huge pool of high-performance storage systems, primarily from digital-media specialist DataDirect Networks. Russell explained that every piece of video his team receives is immediately sent to an 800TB SAS disk that’s connected to more than 200 processing servers. Once the servers are done converting the file, it moves on down the line. DataDirect claims transfer speeds of more than 240 GBps for digital media files.

VidLab also maintains a 3.5-petabyte data warehouse that Russell said is growing exponentially. Interestingly, Russell said that its orginal data warehouse was only 300TB, but that now its smallest volume of any type is 100TB. VidLab needs such a voluminous storage setup not only because it houses so much high-definition video, but also because it wants everything available to convert to new encoding standards as they come along.

To Consumers

Latency matters when delivering content to consumers, too. Russell said VidLab utilizes a number of CDN providers for redundancy and stability, and explained how the streaming process is designed for an optimal end-user experience. Essentially, he said, any given part of a file is transient on users’ devices, so as long as they’re getting a steady stream from the CDN, they don’t have to wait for an entire download to complete in order to watch their content.

Going forward, Russell said he sees cloud computing playing a big role in VidLab’s operations, although it needs to overcome a few issues. One is security because, as noted above, Hollywood wants to keep its content safe, and the other is the general lack of high-performance hardware and workflow process in the cloud. However, he said, cloud computing is very appealing because it would let video on-demand providers such as VidLab manage elasticly scalable systems and distribute processing tasks across as many or as few servers as needed.

Speed limit image courtesy of Flickr user jpctalbot.

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That being said, the company promises it can cut page-load times in half, even for customers already using CDNs or load balancers. It does this by intelligently routing jobs across its “global elastic multi-cloud network … using more than 100 techniques such as domain sharding, CSS spriting and content delivery network (CDN) balancing.”

I have reached out to Yottaa to confirm its cloud providers and locations and will update this post when I hear back.

Update: Yottaa uses 11 different cloud providers for Yottaa Optimizer, including Amazon Web Services. During the recent outage, a company spokesperson told me, Yottaa was able to reroute AWS operations to other clouds to avoid any lengthy downtime. It plans to automate this capability for customers in the future.

The company also uses AWS to host its Yottaa Insight service, which tests and monitors website performance and provides suggestions to improve load speed. That product won Yottaa a spot as a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

Yottaa’s service highlights one of the big sweet spots for cloud computing, which is the ability for startups to compete with CDNs and other service providers without having to build their own infrastructure. By writing smart software and leveraging cloud providers’ already-built infrastructure, companies such as Yottaa can keep their overhead down, which results a lower cost service for customers, too.

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