If you have talked to us about caching in recent months, you probably know that we are now lukewarm on open ended third party caching servers . The simple un-encrypted content of the Internet circa 2010 has been replaced by dynamically generated pages along with increased content encryption. It’s not that the caching servers don’t work, it’s just that if they follow rules of good practice, the amount of data that a caching server can cache has diminished greatly over the last few years.
The good news is that Apple has realized the strain they are putting on Business and ISP networks when their updates come out. They have recently released an easy to implement low-cost caching solution specifically for Apple content. In fact, one of our customers noted in a recent discussion group that they are using an old MAC mini to cache iOS updates for an entire College Campus.
Other notes on Caching Options
Akamai offers a cloud solution. Usually hosted at larger providers, but if you are buying bandwidth in bulk sometimes you can often piggyback on their savings and get a discount on cached traffic.
There is also a service offered by Netflix for larger providers. However, last I checked you must be using 10 gigabits sustained Netflix traffic to qualify.
NetEqualizer News Blog 
Leave a Reply