Fastly has raised $10 million in a Series B round for its SSD-powered content delivery network (CDN) used by the likes of Disqus, Twitter and GitHub. The round was led by August Capital.

Fastly, founded by Artur Bergman, the former CTO of Wikia, uses a patent-pending fast-caching engine that delivers content at what the company says is the fastest recorded time to first byte. Fastly caches content, making it possible to do instant purges. For example, on a blog like TechCrunch, a writer may post and then a few minutes later update the story. Until the cache purges, readers will see the older version. As we all know, purges that do not happen quickly can make for a horrid user experience.

Legacy CDNs often have older infrastructure, Bergman said in a phone interview. Replacing servers with SSD is often costly and requires knowledge about how to program it. Fastly started from scratch with SSDs and has the experience to program the SSD correctly.

Bergman said legacy providers might take seven to 10 minutes to update. With its SSD and 10 gigabyte network ports, Fastly can have a site updated in 120 milliseconds. They do this also by designing the network for small data objects, meaning real-time updates, such as photos or tweets. The pioneering CDN providers were designed to move large data objects, not real-time updates. They just can’t move data in the volume and velocity that is the norm in today’s world.

Fastly is expanding its network with the new funding. They say they primarily see competitors such as Edgecast and Akamai when talking to customers.

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