NGENIX, the first Russian nationwide Content Delivery Network (CDN) launched

Things are heating up in mother Russia!

No, please don’t panic. It’s not “that” kind of revolution which is taking place there now.
It’s another kind, a revolution which took the world by storm in the last decade and still continues today. Some countries entered in this revolution earlier, some later.

But the later ones sometimes are leading the pack and one of them is…yes, Russia!

Comscore released a study at in which states that Russia has the fastest growing Internet population from Europe. It grew by 27% in June, 2008 comparing with June, 2007 (over 17 million). The second place is taken by France (21%) and Spain (15%).

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However, a local research foundation called Public Opinion Foundation shows that the total Internet users are around 32 million (spring 2008). An English version of that page is here: http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/projects/ocherk/eint0702 (although it’s not updated with 2008 data yet).

At a population of over 141 million people that means that about 12% of that population goes online (about 22% according to Public Opinion Foundation). That’s the entire Romanian population and then some (for POF numbers).

Everything has to be scalable

Now, you know Russia is the largest country in the world when it comes to its territory. That puts pressure on its infrastructure, including IT infrastructure. Everything has to be big and more scalable.

NGENIX (use Google Translate for the English version) is the first Russian Content Delivery Network (CDN) to address the huge local market, according to Quintura blog.

NGENIX potential customers include media publishers, multimedia content providers and software distributors. So far, it opened points of presence in Moscow (their headquarters), Saint-Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok (see map).

They use UNIX-based solutions, Juniper M series routers and Gigabit switches Cisco Catalyst switches hardware. There’s no list of customers but since it just launched that’s understandable. Having a large territory and good Internet growth rate I’m assuming that more regional content delivery networks will enter the Russian market pretty soon.