Planning the number of streaming media caches needed

Factors to consider

No one formula exists to determine the number of streaming media caches that you need. Your Network Appliance sales engineer can help you determine the number of caches that are appropriate for your organization, weighing factors such as the following:

Size of your organization, the number of branch offices of your organization, and the distance between branch offices
Number of simultaneous connections you want to support
A linear relationship exists between the number of connections that a streaming media cache can handle and bandwidth usage per connection. NetCache should be able to split twice as many connections at 28.8 kbps than at 56 kbps.
Amount of bandwidth savings you want to achieve
When you are planning your deployment, consider how deploying streaming media caches in different locations would affect bandwidth. If, for example, you deploy only one streaming media cache and multiple clients request the same live stream, only one connection to the server is established. If you deploy two streaming media caches and clients of each cache request the same unique stream, each cache must establish a connection to the server.

You might, for example, want to deploy regional streaming media caches in areas of the world where bandwidth is expensive.
Your desire for quality media streams
If your bandwidth usage is high and you do not want to purchase more streaming media caches, you must be willing to accept low-quality streams.
Whether you want your streaming media cache to function also as a Web cache or news cache
For deployments with heavy traffic loads, Network Appliance recommends that you configure a NetCache appliance for a single service, for example, only for streaming media service or only for Web service. Deploying dedicated NetCache appliances improves hit rates and bandwidth savings. Small sites with lighter traffic loads, such as at branch offices in the enterprise, might find that running multiple services on a NetCache appliance does not affect performance.