Recently, Varnish Software and Intel announced a major step forward for streaming (and content) delivery, reaching almost 400 Gbps on off-the-shelf hardware. The Supermicro server was powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, running a new NUMA-aware version of Varnish Enterprise. Our performance benchmarks were featured in a demo at Mobile World Congress, available here.

Reaching almost 400 Gbps on a standard server is likely a new record for standard software, which may have a disruptive impact on existing hardware and software technologies that sometimes can only deliver a tenth of this capacity.

Being the fastest and most performant is in the DNA of Varnish Software, and our core engineers are obsessed with breaking boundaries like this (expect them to reach even higher). Working with amazing partners like Intel to achieve benchmarks like this is very exciting for us, but there is also an important reason behind it.

US election night news coverage during presidential election years are usually “event” TV, so attracting higher-than-normal traffic is expected. But 2020 has created what can only be described as a sustained spike in live video streaming traffic, as vote counts rolled in and revealed many states’ races too close to call. Traffic to news sites more than quadrupled. 

Usually when we talk about the Massive Storage Engine (MSE), we’re talking about its main features and use cases. After all, storage is a kind of hidden, unsexy necessity that powers, in part, many of the conveniences we take for granted: ubiquitous on-demand streaming services, for example. The instant-delivery accessibility of these content libraries is not magic even if it sometimes seems like it. And our MSE discussion normally revolves around the efficiency and speed enabled by a smart storage and caching setup designed for high-performance video distribution, CDNs, and large-cache use cases.

­Now that the dust has settled on this year’s IBC show, we at Varnish wanted to highlight some key trends that we saw and heard being discussed at the conference and on the show floor for those of you who may not have been able to make the trek to Amsterdam. This year, it was just as interesting to see what didn’t end up making a prominent appearance at the event as what did. Here are our five key observations: