CACHEBOX follows a set of rules to determine which content to cache and when to delete objects from storage. These rules have been optimised to deliver great performance, but we’ve also developed smart features for those occasions when you could benefit from breaking the rules.
Cache What You Need – Whenever You Choose
Access content even when you’re offline
Where dealing with slow or intermittent internet connections, many remote schools are disadvantaged: E-learning is difficult or impossible to achieve, with a large majority of crucial content comprising heavy video or media files.
With CACHEBOX’s intuitive ‘Media Library’ service, users can instantly access and share important learning materials like video and media files.
Admins can download content to the ‘Media Library’ – for example a YouTube video.
Even where there’s no internet connection, CACHEBOX admins can upload content straight from a computer – e.g. from a DVD ROM or USB disk – on to the Library.
All saved content can be custom organised to suit your needs – present and share it the way you want:
- Store useful media and e-learning videos from a local PC or other education websites – and share these as and when needed
- Get instant access to files on iPads, tablets and other devices via QR links (automatically generated for each file and folder)
- For very small connections, schedule content to be precached for quieter times of the day, ready for use the next day
Relieve Peak Traffic with Precaching
To take advantage of your internet connection during quiet periods, you can schedule CACHEBOX to visit a URL at a specific time and cache the content it finds there so that it can be served locally when your users need it. Precaching can help reduce delays during busy periods, such as at the start of lessons, and improve internet access speeds at no extra cost.
You can control how often CACHEBOX checks for changes on the original site to refresh its local copy and set limits for the amount of data it downloads. To help you schedule jobs effectively, CACHEBOX produces graphical reports showing usage statistics on a daily basis.
So, if you know that users will be checking certain websites on a daily basis, you can refresh objects in the cache before the first user visits the website. Teachers can download web content that is central to their lesson plans the day before to avoid wasting valuable lesson time.
Protect cached ‘priority’ content from automatic deletion
CACHEBOX maximises bandwidth savings by ensuring that you always have storage capacity for the most popular content. It achieves this by regularly checking for content that hasn’t been requested recently and removing it from storage.
Where you have a very small internet connection or are dealing with particularly large files, there may be crucial content that you never want to be ‘cleaned’ from your cache, regardless of whether or not it has been recently requested.
With CACHEBOX you can specify a portion of CACHEBOX’s disk storage to be reserved for ‘static content’ that is protected from automatic removal. This is useful when you want to store certain content permanently. You can cache and protect large files that are only accessed once per term. Similarly, specific online videos can be downloaded and saved to a customisable video portal for access at any preferred time.
ApplianSys works with leading educational content providers to store their specific content effectively. To cater for cases where the focus is solely on that content, we offer SSD-only based CACHEBOX models for maximum performance.