"We rolled out 1200 Chromebooks to classrooms and CACHEBOX means that we haven't needed to increase our bandwidth."
Rodney Leer, Brenham Independent School District, USA
"ApplianSys is the only vendor that takes the time to look at our appliances for us, and it really goes a long way."
Mike Caruso, Orland Park Consolidated High School District 230, USA
"Our bandwidth problems have been practically eliminated. Monitoring & customization is a snap with the web interface."
Desert Academy, Santa Fe, USA
"CACHEBOX is incredibly easy to use. It takes very little maintenance, which is extremely important ..."
Dustin Rowe, Ronan School District 30, USA
"I was really impressed with the build of the box, this is a great appliance!"
Louis Webb, Nueces Canyon CISD
Most School Network Managers would agree that caching can help them manage the growing demand from teachers to use bandwidth-intensive video content in the classroom. Because video traffic does not behave like simple HTTP web pages, some caching solutions struggle to deal with the complexity.
CACHEBOX has the intelligence to deal with this modern traffic:
Caching the same videos stored at different URLs
Almost all the major media sites use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve video content. This stores the same content at multiple URLs which means that two users could be viewing the same video from different servers.
For example, you’re looking at a video from a server in London:
http://london-23.example.com/398jkl345nmsdf3/
But your friend in the same building views it via a server in Berlin:
http://berlin-45.example.com/398jkl345nmsdf3/
The video is the same, but the URL is completely different.
Many caching solutions would ‘think’ you were viewing different files because they store content based on the full URL. So you would use up your bandwidth to download the same material over and over again and your cache would be full of duplicate copies of the same video.
CACHEBOX solves the problem with custom video caching extensions especially for CDNs. It locates and serves video site content by identifying the underlying video object – regardless of which server it is requested from. This dramatically improves YouTube video caching as well as caching for other large files that are delivered over CDNs like software updates.
Changes in the way video websites deliver their content
Websites like YouTube often change the rules for presenting their content which can break caching mechanisms.
To address these changes, ApplianSys creates custom video caching extensions to work with the new delivery systems. These updates are supplied automatically to our customer’s CACHEBOXes via ‘sub-system updates’. So, you don’t have to worry about monitoring and responding to the changes yourself.
Use of video controls before a download is complete
Changing a video’s resolution or using the back/forward controls can be problematic for a simple web-cache, resulting in broken controls or complete inability to display video content. In addition, when controls are used mid-stream (while the browser has not yet downloaded the entire video), the browser requests a new file with the video starting at that particular point. As a result, the storage of an unintelligent cache gets filled up with multiple copies of the same video, starting from different frames. These copies will most likely never be requested again.
CACHEBOX storage doesn’t get filled up with video fragments that have little chance of ever being served again. So CACHEBOX needs smaller storage than competing solutions to achieve the same performance – saving you money.
Range Requests
CACHEBOX is smart. In supporting range requests, CACHEBOX can cache and serve just the part of a video that the user requests, e.g. the last 5 minutes. With no need to download the whole file, you save even more bandwidth.
Mobile traffic typically uses range requests to access YouTube content. With the numbers of mobile devices accessing YouTube in schools continually rising, CACHEBOX will save even more bandwidth, maximising the use of learning video content.