Compaq? Caching? Nice contract. The start of something big?
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CMP Media Inc. - Friday, April 21, 2000
Apr. 21, 2000 (Computer Reseller News - CMP via COMTEX) -- Boston - ISPs are taking a close look at
caching, with many already adopting the technology. Some ISPs, however, are not quite sure if caching
is a valid approach to alleviating poor Internet performance or just a temporary fix.
"Some caching vendors have been very successful creating a market perception for the need for caching,
but we don't know if that perception is adequately tied to the problem it's trying to solve," said Doug Mow,
vice president of product strategy at Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. "It appears to
be a temporary solution to a big problem, until something better comes along."
Currently, caching is worth taking advantage of, said Mow. Qwest does use caching for peak usage
events. For example, a pharmaceutical company held online training in three locations-Seattle, Phoenix
and Washington, D.C. During the training, it made sense for Qwest to place caches at points on its
network closer to those locations to decongest traffic.
What Qwest and other ISPs appear more interested in, however, is using caches in conjunction with
content delivery services. Although many ISPs use the terms "caching" and "content delivery"
interchangeably, analysts make distinctions between the two.
"Caching is just moving items or pieces of information around to position it closer to the end user," said
Alex Benik, analyst with the Yankee Group, Boston. "Caching is part of content delivery, which involves
storage and bringing information closer to the end user, but also many other things such as load balancing
and analysis and proper routing [of data] across ISPs' networks and the Internet at large."
Caches essentially are appliances that watch requests coming in from end users, retrieve the requested
information from the origin Web server and store that data in its own memory. Subsequent requests for
that information are fulfilled from the cache instead of the origin server.
For some time, caches have been used primarily by ISPs to cut bandwidth costs by storing frequently
accessed data, or content, on caches placed on the edge of their networks.
In doing so, the content remains on the ISP's local network rather than generating traffic over other
providers' networks across the Internet. This speeds delivery of content to users, reduces the monthly cost
for bandwidth and delays the need for network bandwidth upgrades.
TeleScan Inc., which hosts Web sites for financial services companies such as American Express, is
introducing Compaq Computer Corp.'s TaskSmart caches to reduce the amount of traffic coming into its
own SQL servers. When a customer clicks on a popular news story, for example, that request is not sent
to the SQL server but is retrieved from the closest cache on TeleScan's network.
"Caches allow us to serve more customers with fewer resources while at the same time allows us to be
extremely timely to requests," said Peter Cole, performance and availability architect at TeleScan,
Houston.
More recently, ISPs, especially those moving into new service arenas such as Web hosting, realized they
could sell caching in combination with content delivery as a value-added service.
Exodus Communications Inc., for example, has built its own caching and content delivery architecture
called ReadyCache. ReadyCache is built on Inktomi Corp.'s caching platform and places clusters of
caches at the edge of Exodus' network. The ISP recently introduced content delivery services developed
by Mirror Image Internet Inc. that allows the ISP to have caches outside of its own network.
"Content delivery benefits us because customers view us as more than just a rack and a pipe," said Niel
Robertson, vice president of research at Exodus, Santa Clara, Calif. "Instead, they see us as a managed
services provider with the ability to scale massively."
The line between caching and content delivery is blurred, with many ISPs predicting that there will be no
separation between the two over time.
"Caching is storing information on a bunch of servers around the world, and companies like Akamai
[Technology Inc.] deliver content via their global network. It's just a play on words," said Brent Anderson,
manager of site engineering, at Digex Inc, Beltsville, Md.
CacheFlow Inc. and Akamai's recent partnership to cross-sell each other's technology and services further
exemplifies this union between caching and content delivery, as does Exodus' marriage of Inktomi's
platform with Mirror Image's services.
Still, caching and content delivery only address a piece of the problem. Other companies such as Equinox
Systems Inc. and InterNap Network Services are approaching Internet performance woes from another
angle. These companies are attempting to streamline the way carriers exchange traffic. This traffic
crosses "peering points," which are connection points between network providers.
"Caching, content delivery and traffic exchange vendors are all trying to solve part of the problem and
they're all sort of circulatory to each other, but they haven't come together yet, which sort of gets at why
performance is not great," said Yankee Group's Benik.
crn.com
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