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WorldDirector globally distributed cloud

WorldDirector: Our technology for globally distributed, secure, resilient clouds & CDN

WorldDirector globally distributed cloud hosting is a managed service offered using hybrid (private and public clouds) located in Europe, USA and Asia. Additional private and public clouds, aggregating both clients’ and cloud providers’ infrastructure at any location, may be enabled with the WorldDirector technology, mostly without change or configuration of customers’ software. WorldDirector (active) configuration provides the following characteristics to all of our cloud services (i.e. hosting, Databases, email, DNS):

  • Embedded, automatic Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
  • Edge caching for Internet servers and applications, regardless of protocol (HTTP, FTP, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.);
  • Enabler for multimedia streaming (audio & video) from multiple locations, to bring multimedia content close to the edge of the Internet, and to the end-user;
  • HTTP content acceleration via standard IETF Content-Encoding to any Web site, regardless of the server’s operating system, HTTP origin server or type of Internet application;
  • Static and dynamic web server accelerator. Adds scalability at a lower cost compared to any web portal or application. Offers up to  40 times increase in performance for dynamic portals, with more than 200 concurrent accesses.
  • Global and local load balancing reduce the load automatically on the origin Web site using additional WorldDirector nodes. Each WorldDirector server’s cost is a fraction of the origin Web server in case of large portals. For smaller sites, each WorldDirector node may be shared among different web sites;
  • Protects against DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) and Internet Worms, by filtering undesired requests to the origin server. This may be especially useful to avoid situations of network congestion and breakdowns such as those created by all kinds of attacks;
  • Automatic configuration and de-configuration of each WorldDirector node when servers are down and up again. Any server can be brought down for maintenance when needed, or any network segment can fail without disrupting service until at least one of the last WorldDirector node is reachable. This is extremely helpful for government or e-commerce sites, or in the case to handle catastrophic events.

The fully automatic mechanisms provided by WorldDirector (including automatic reconfiguration and automatic disaster recovery)  is absolutely transparent to end-user, application and administrators, and does NOT depend on any master/slave, and has NO central point of failure characteristics. It also introduces no latency at all, compared to other masters/slave or star centred solutions. When using Milano Venture’s managed cloud services, we proactively manage all aspects of security, configuration, updates, and 24/7 monitoring and alarms against hardware, software issues and attacks.

Our approach translates into reliable, high-speed service, built-in redundancy and disaster recovery, and extremely low latency, so that you do not need a team of dedicated IT experts to manage your cloud. Our approach allows a modular expansion option for additional services and integration with any private and public cloud (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.), should an upgrade be desired later.

Milano Venture’s technology is used successfully by corporations, NGOs, government, web, global media, broadcasting, advertising and communication agencies and offers the highest degree of reliability and customer satisfaction.

Contact us and request a Whitepaper on our WorldDirector distributed cloud technology.

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WorldDirector History

WorldDirector was designed in late 1994 at NEXUS-International Broadcasting Association non-profit R&D labs in Milan, Italy, and deployed for streaming audio, FTP archives and web pages belonging to the Association’s members simultaneously from servers located in Europe and USA since early 1995.

WorldDirector was later offered to commercial companies to support the association’s activities in local and international broadcasting. Later from 2001-2017, Wornex International SRL (Milan, Italy), developed commercial sales of the WorldDirector CDN and globally distributed clouds, increasing both their customer base and data centre infrastructure in USA, Europe and Asia.

The technology is licensed for commercial exploitation to Wornex International (Ireland) in 2017, and it has been made available commercially as a fully managed solution by Milano Ventures Ltd.

WorldDirector core technology

In a very different way versus other Content Delivery Networks developed after 1995, WorldDirector is a proprietary technology based on open source. WorldDirector has been conceived to provide globally distributed and fully redundant content requires no content modification of web pages (i.e. no “akamization”) and offers no single point of failure. It was conceived to continue providing delivery of content under a disaster situation (like a catastrophic earthquake) when both DNS and network connectivity may remain interrupted or disrupted for any period. It was also designed to provide fast access to localised content in less developed countries where connectivity may be scarce, slow or congested. WorldDirector is currently deployed under two main variants:

  • WorldDirector active globally distributed cloud or CDN provides total replication and acceleration of content at each node. Each node is independent of the CDN logic and can survive multiple failures at any other node. No central authority and no central point of failure exist to undermine each node’s possibility to continue providing access to edge content. Using its active configuration, any number of WorldDirector nodes can become unavailable (i.e. for maintenance) or unreachable. At the same time, the content remains available and reachable from each of the still reachable servers.
  • Under this configuration nodes (or servers) can be brought down for maintenance, and brought back on-line without any disruption to content delivery. WordlDirector transparently implements HyperScale. This involves seamlessly provisioning and removing any number of nodes to respond to additional user or application demand in term of network, CPU, disk or memory resources on any hybrid cloud implementation based on WordlDirector.
  • WorldDirector passive globally distributed cloud or CDN provides remote (edge) caching and acceleration from one or more origin servers. Like the most other cloud or CDN implementations, this configuration can fail to provide access to content if the network connection to the origin(s) servers is interrupted or the origin server(s) are down for maintenance.

Comparisons with other CDN Technologies

Most other CDN technologies are based on a “redirector” or “CDN director” node placed at a well-connected Point of Presence (POP). The redirector used by most other CDNs acts as a single point of failure and must always be reachable to sustain any failures or attacks for all CDN nodes to deliver content. However, when problems happen at the redirector node or if the redirector is unreachable from the edge of the Internet due to routing issues, the cloud or CDN network becomes entirely or partially unavailable. As such, the redirector acts as a single point of failure for the whole CDN. Redirectors also add latency, especially for clients at the periphery of the Internet.

The WorldDirector technology by Wornex International and Milano Ventures Ltd deployed in an active globally distributed cloud or active CDN mode for N nodes (N>=2), is independent of any redirector or central authority. WorldDirector nodes can survive network failures while providing service seamlessly until at least one node is reachable.

WorldDirector does not employ redirectors by design but uses multiple (N>=1) globally redundant autonomous nodes. Another difference with other CDNs is that WorldDirector does not need to employ hundreds or thousands of caching nodes. WorldDirector is more straightforward to administer and has a lower installation and maintenance cost than other CDNs.

WorldDirector also uses multiple AS (Autonomous Systems), so it is immune from routing issues or downtime when using a single provider or single AS.