SoftLayer Provides Infrastructure for Streaming Masters Tournament

Bringing the exploits of the world's top golfers at Georgia's Augusta National Golf Club to sports fans worldwide, on-demand data center services provider SoftLayer Technologies provided critical data center and network infrastructure for streaming video of the 2010 Masters Golf Tournament live on the Internet between April 5 and 11.

More than 600 SoftLayer servers were deployed for the webcast, which bumped network traffic to peaks approaching 170Gbps -- more than 40 percent above normal traffic loads. SoftLayer has been chosen as a content delivery network partner in the webcasts of many major events such as pop icon Michael Jackson's memorial service and the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

"SoftLayer is the ideal infrastructure provider when a Web service of any kind, from content delivery to social media applications, needs to massively scale for a specific period or event," SoftLayer engineering vice president Ric Moseley said in a statement. "With fully automated services, our customers know they can scale to exactly the type and level of resources they need, for as long as they need them. It's a seamless extension of their day-to-day environment--just as reliable and robust."

With more than 26,000 deployed servers between its three geographically diverse data centers, SoftLayer has more than 300Gbps of total network capacity, and is continuously expanding its network capabilities. According to the company, its total capacity will reach 1,000Gbps in the coming weeks with the launch of multiple new network Points of Presence and the addition of several network carriers.

Since 2008, SoftLayer has provided a CDN service, CDNLayer, which provides optimized delivery of content using a network of geographically distributed server nodes for storing and streaming material.