ENGINEERING

3Crowd Technologies, a provider of management tools for cloud-based services, today announced the public availability of CrowdDirector. Tested by customers worldwide, CrowdDirector is in full production deployment with Break Media, as well as other large media companies. Revision3 is also in the deployment process with 3Crowd. CrowdDirector is now available to any content provider looking to find a profitable balance between creating great content and the cost of delivering it to consumers.

Break Media, a publisher of online entertainment destinations for men, is using CrowdDirector to optimize its current mix of CDNs and cloud providers. CrowdDirector enables Break Media to re-direct content from any location in the world to improve performance, reduce operational overhead, and ensure resiliency. The success is being replicated across all of the Break Media properties, including the flagship site Break.com.

“Delivering dynamic, engaging content to audiences around the world is a real-time business, and CrowdDirector helps us make real-time decisions about how this content is shared and delivered,” said Nick Wilson, CTO, Break Media. “CrowdDirector simplifies the process and gives us a cost model that we can control for maximum efficiency.”

CrowdDirector, a vendor-neutral management service, effectively acts as a powerful content load balancer on any network, enabling enterprises and content owners to manage their services across multiple CDNs, cloud services, and web servers, using a set of simple and articulate rules.

Revision3, a leading television network for the Internet generation, plans to use 3Crowd to offload delivery traffic to new Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that would quickly and cost effectively meet demand for delivery of its more than 20 programs globally.

“Our fans are leading the way in watching video on everything from big screen TVs to iPads and phones. They demand the best HD experience possible, and we are always looking at new and better ways to deliver that,” said Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3. “3Crowd’s vision promises to enable an even more compelling experience beyond CrowdDirector today, and we’re looking forward to working closely with them to find new ways to deliver great video to our audience, while not breaking the bank.”

3Crowd’s CrowdDirector combines high performance analytics and high-speed traffic control with a highly scalable architecture. Some of the defining features include:

• Rule based load balancing - Users can configure nearly limitless parameters and multiple actions to generate a load balancing policy across multiple network resources.
• Monitoring and analytics - Content providers can actively monitor network resource performance and reliability data. Information related to traffic, downtime, content caching, latency, etc. is continuously collected, logged, and analyzed.
• Interoperable distributed platform - 3Crowd’s network interoperates with multiple CDNs and cloud environments ensuring seamless management of network resources using both HTTP and DNS protocols.
• Intelligent dashboard - CrowdDirector provides an intuitive dashboard that integrates the rules engine, statistics, and analytics in one easy-to-use interface.