Enterprise content delivery network having a central controller for coordinating a set of content servers

An enterprise content delivery network includes two basic components: a set of content servers, and a central controller for providing coordination and control of the content servers. The central controller coordinates the set of distributed servers into a unified system, for example, by providing provisioning, content control, request mapping, monitoring and reporting. Content requests may be mapped to optimal content servers by DNS-based mapping, or by using a policy engine that takes into consideration such factors as the location of a requesting client machine, the content being requested, asynchronous data from periodic measurements of an enterprise network and state of the streaming media servers, and given capacity reservations on the enterprise links. An ECDN provisioned with the basic components facilitates various customer applications, such as one or more of the following: live, corporate, streaming media (internal and Internet sources) and HTTP content delivery.