NTAP mentioned a couple times in this piece on caching.
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Media Hype: Caching In On Rich Content
By Todd Spangler
Inter@ctive Week
October 13, 1999 4:31 PM ET
zdnet.com
Caching server vendors are smelling a sweet opportunity to provide a crucial piece of the content infrastructure for new streaming multimedia services. And, not surprisingly, the competition among them for this new piece of service provider business is already boiling.
You can think of streaming media as intrinsic to Internet Caching 2.0. All the major caching technology companies either already have a streaming-media component for their systems or are busily developing one. Internet cache servers started life as Web caches, storing static Web pages locally to speed up access and to cut bandwidth. Now, handling multimedia Internet content has become a requirement for the next generation of cache servers.
"Streaming media is the future of the Net, and you need a rich device for distributing broadband content," says Shyam Jha, vice president of marketing at caching start-up InfoLibria. InfoLibria is using Windows NT-based multimedia servers from Avid Technology as part of its MediaMall streaming media system.
Inktomi kicked off the trend last year when it announced its intention to incorporate RealNetworks' G2 streaming media server into Inktomi's Traffic Server caching software. Last month, in conjunction with Microsoft's broad band initiative, Inktomi said it will incorporate support for Windows Media Technology.
Also in the game with Inktomi and InfoLibria are Entera, a caching start-up that has made streaming media support a cornerstone of its strategy, and Network Appliance, which is licensing Microsoft's streaming media technology. In addition, executives at CacheFlow and Novell — a relative newcomer to caching — say they have efforts under way to add streaming media support to upcoming versions of their caching products.
Streaming media and caching go together like fire and lighter fluid. The main benefit is that caching moves content closer to the user, and that's especially ideal for streaming media content, which tends to consist of large files that need consistent levels of bandwidth for good playback quality.
Caching vendors see dollar signs in broadband Internet access rollouts. The prevailing opinion is that broadband access providers won't be able to scale up high-bandwidth streaming media services, such as pay-per-view movies, without caching technology.
Just do the math, says Edward Sharp, business development manager for Network Appliance's NetCache product line. His reasoning goes like this: If you have one popular streaming media event, and assume 300 kilobits per second per stream, and a million people are accessing that event, you have 300 gigabits per second for one event.
"The Internet will never be able to handle that event," Sharp says. "You need caches at the edge of the Internet to handle multimedia."
The real payoff for cache vendors in this new space hasn't materialized yet, observers say. Yet, the fight for position is already in full flower.
At the head of the pack is Inktomi, with caching customers that include America Online and hosting company Exodus Communications. The company touts Traffic Server's flexibility as a software product as a competitive advantage.
But InfoLibria and Network Appliance say their turnkey appliances deliver scalability that Inktomi and others can't match. "Our lowest-end NetCache [which costs less than $20,000] can handle more than 100 Mbps [megabits per second] of streams," says Amit Pandey, director of Network Appliance's NetCache marketing.
InfoLibria claims one rack of Media Mall servers can saturate an OC-48 link — the equivalent of 2.5 Gbps.
One thing seems certain: As more high-bandwidth services come on line, service providers will be looking closely at the marriage of streaming media and caching. |
