NAB Show: Varnish Software Unveils Massive Storage Engine 4

Varnish Software AB unveiled Massive Storage Engine (MSE) 4, a solution for storing and managing cached objects and their metadata, and the latest addition to Varnish Enterprise 6.

MSE 4 further improves availability, reduces latency and ensures customers can always deliver the optimal digital experiences, under high loads or even when certain drives fail. It’s for video distribution and large-cache use cases, as it adds persistence and resilience to content delivery internally, externally, and at the edge.

These new features and capabilities complement recent enhancements to the company’s portfolio of content delivery software solutions.

“Content delivery use cases are rapidly evolving, and we are seeing that live streaming and VOD are the highest growth segments,” said Adrian Herrera, CMO. “The challenge for content providers, telcos and even traditional CDNs is how to support this growth and deliver the best digital experience in an economical way. A large part of this is having the ability to store, access and deliver content as efficiently and reliably as possible, even in the face of hardware failures and traffic spikes, which is what MSE 4 enables.”

The MSE 3 already offered performance caching and persistence for 100TB+ data sets. MSE 4 builds on this foundation, making storage more efficient and reducing wear and tear on drives. The enhancements improve speeds when managing metadata, often cutting the I/O operations per second by half. Additionally, new updates to dynamic configuration processes, content integrity checks and disk error handling can prevent and mitigate the impacts of downtime for cached content, leading to greater resilience and less end-user disruption.

MSE 4 integrates with Varnish Enterprise 6, the feature-rich web cache and HTTP accelerator, and further expands on its many capabilities and benefits, including the newly upgraded the company’s Controller 5.1.

The Controller 5.1 provides tools for robust traffic routing and load balancing to ensure content is always delivered from the optimal location. The recent updates include a streamlined UI, which provides value from day one; and a suite of new tools to customize, modify and manage custom routing to support the needs of virtually any configuration.

In addition to MSE 4 and Controller 5.1, the company recently announced record-breaking benchmarks for content delivery performance, power and TCO efficiency. All advancements enhance Varnish’s Content Delivery Software stack which can be deployed to any location, at the edge or elsewhere, and are optimized for VOD and live streaming content delivery.

“Edge is rapidly becoming essential to delivering the optimal video experiences. The only way to support this in a sustainable way is by disaggregating content delivery from the underlying infrastructure to extend the useful life and ROI of existing hardware, ensure you get the most value from new hardware investments and move content delivery as close to the point of consumption to improve QoS,” added Herrera.

The edge computing market will generate $178 billion by 2026, per STL Partners, with edge content delivery contributing to 18% of total addressable revenue.

The company will be at NAB Show 2023.