CHUAH: "With the introduction of Caching by AIMS, this cost can be reduced by up to 50%."
PETALING JAYA: Carrier-neutral datacentre Aims Group has announced the expansion of its Managed Services portfolio.
A cloud-model based service known as "Caching by AIMS" now joins the centre's current suite of services with different levels of IT infrastructure and application hosting.
"Currently we expect Malaysian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collectively spend about RM60mil in international bandwidth cost for the whole of this year.
"But with the introduction of Caching by AIMS, this cost can be reduced by up to 50%," said Henry Chuah, vice-president of new business at Aims Group.
In particular, Chuah said, the datacentre's ISP customers are seeing much bigger demands for faster connectivity, driven by the market's increasingly ferocious appetite for more real-time news and updates, online gaming and retail applications, as well as streaming videos - from both fixed and mobile customer endpoints.
While this is a great opportunity for ISPs to monetise these demands, Chuah said, they are also facing significant technical and economic challenges because of this explosion in bandwidth demands.
The cloud-based caching service works by collating the number of content downloads, be it a media file, YouTube video, torrents or movie from the Internet.
Once the downloads reach a set number of hits, indicating its popularity, a copy of the mentioned data items is captured and stored at Aim's facility.
"Therefore, for future requests for the same content, the source is now 'virtually' closer because it is being cached at datacentres located across the country, rather than on servers located overseas," said Chuah.
In addition to that, a subscription to the service will allow local ISPs to be more cost-effective while at the same time delivering faster, providing smoother and more reliable access to content to subscribers.
Another added advantage is that the datacentre's cache servers do regular checks on the cache content, and those no longer needed are automatically deleted from the user's servers.
"Although this service is newly introduced, we are very confident that it will soon see significant uptake by ISPs, content owners and advertisers when they see the huge revenue advantage that AIMS' caching can bring to their business," said Aims Group CEO Kok Hin Chiew.
For more information, go to www.aims.com.my.