Nimrod Koslovski, VP of strategy and legal affairs at Petach Tikva-based Oversi, said its technology, which is delivered as a caching device called OverCache, is deployed on an ISP’s network and monitors which files are being requested most often in order to download them to a cache installed at its data center. He said the cache then presents itself as a peer on the network from which that content is available.
The system is not proactive in the sense of actually pushing content, but responds to changes in network traffic, enabling ISPs to manage P2P traffic in their network, avoiding congestion and the imbalances that P2P traffic normally causes, resulting in the degradation of other services. For instance, he said normal P2P tends to consume the uplink as well as the downlink of a connection.
Oversi also has a storage product called OverDrive, which it described as an application-specific storage system tuned to store most common files found on computers in home and small office environments. It said it is designed to target the basic requirements of users in terms of storage, back-up, and management of data and enables ISPs to deliver these services to their user base at minimal costs or as part of their enhanced service package.
Next on its roadmap, said Koslovski, is a device called OverCache – CDN that will include other elements necessary for an ISP to offer CDN services, which he said will offer a way of seeding the content, a presentation layer, a DRM capability, and a monetization system. He said the product is in development and should be unveiled early next year.
Koslovski said there are several reasons that Cisco took part in the funding round. First, they want to understand the P2P market and they recognize the need for a quality assurance mechanism in P2P, with a caching mechanism being the way to scale with assured quality, he said. Second, Cisco has some important technology from its P-Cube acquisition for traffic shaping at ISPs, so we complement them in that area, since P-Cube enables the shaping, blocking certain users from accessing content, for instance, while we optimize the traffic to the users that are allowed to access it. With this investment Cisco is signaling to the market its interest in this space. This sounds like a coded way of saying Cisco could end up buying Oversi if it likes the results of what it sees as a strategic investor.
Our View
It is interesting that Cisco is putting money into a storage systems company. That’s not to say Oversi has any plans to compete head-on with EMC or NetApp going forward, but it is nonetheless deploying storage devices on ISPs’ networks to enable them to handle content distribution in a cost-effective manner, leveraging the power of P2P into the bargain.
