Varnish Software Unveils Power Efficiency Benchmarks for Live and VOD Streaming

Collaboration with Intel and Supermicro Intended to Help Broadcasters, Telcos and CSPs Forecast and Optimize Content Delivery Energy Consumption

Varnish Software, a web caching, video streaming and content delivery software company, announced new power efficiency benchmarks for both live-linear and Video on Demand (VOD).

The results—including up to 1.18 Gbps per watt for live streaming and 0.73 Gbps per watt for VOD—are detailed in a new white paper released by Intel. The white paper includes research into the scalability of CDN edge node performance and energy efficiency across four different performance levels and builds on the ongoing collaboration and previous significant achievement set by Varnish, Intel and Supermicro earlier this year.

“As content delivery becomes more of a strategic function that organizations are bringing in house, benchmarks like these will help them understand what is needed to achieve sustainability goals and objectives,” said Frank Miller, CTO of Varnish Software. “The need to deliver more throughput with less energy and at the lowest cost has never been greater.” 

The latest benchmarks were accomplished using Varnish Enterprise 6.0 content delivery software deployed on Supermicro Superserver powered by Intel Xeon D, and CloudDC and Hyper 1RU/2RU servers powered by Intel 4^th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs without the use of specialized, added-cost TLS offload cards.

According to Varnish, the configurations selected for these tests “demonstrated excellent efficiency” over a wide range of performance levels and power budgets and “illustrate what is possible with commercially available software and well-configured broadly available Intel based servers, without the use of accelerators that add cost.”