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Caching Is Catching On
The market heats up as businesses look for ways to relieve overburdened Web sites and intranet
By Brian Riggs and Bob Wallace
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ncyclopedia Britannica Inc. knows something about everything, and that now includes the hazards of launching a Web site. When the publishing company recently made its encyclopedia available online for free, the unexpected crush of traffic slowed performance so much that the company had to take the site down. Brittanica plans to solve the problem with network caching.
Caching takes the pressure off busy Web sites by storing frequently accessed information in RAM or disk memory, eliminating the need to repeatedly process requests for that data. As E-business grows, the market for caching products and services is heating up. Inktomi Inc., which sells high-end caching software to Internet service providers, this week will introduce caching products for intranets and corporate Web server farms. Novell is working with switch vendors and service providers to improve the performance of its Internet Caching System software, and will add Legend Computer to the list of vendors that build caching appliances based on its technology. And CacheFlow Inc. is striking deals with Internet-filtering software developers to include URL filtering in its caching appliances.
Cisco Systems this week will unveil a plan to embed caching and other performance-optimizing functions into its switches and routers, following its acquisition last week of Tasmania Network Systems Inc., a startup that develops network caching. Says Cisco chief technical officer Judy Estren, "Caching plays an important role because it allows you to distribute content within the network and not put the same bandwidth load in all parts of your network."
Britannica.com, the online division of Encyclopedia Britannica, launched its new Web site Oct. 19, drawing millions of hits within the first 24 hours, thanks to a wave of advance publicity. The company, which had not expected traffic to build so quickly, decided to bring down the clogged site until it could ensure better performance.
Ironically, Brittanica.com had signed up to use Akamai Technologies Inc.'s caching service, but underestimated how quickly it would need the service. "We'd planned to phase in the caching service a couple of weeks after the launch," says senior VP of product development Kent Devereaux. "If we could have done anything differently, it would be to have that service on earlier. We were overwhelmed."
The site is due to be back up early this week, supported by Akamai's service. Akamai will host all of the site's bandwidth-intensive data, including its 10,000 images. "The caching service will be a major help in delivering our rich media," says Devereaux. "It will allow us to distribute some of the hits across Akamai's vast network of 1,200 servers."
Brittanica has a lot riding on the site. The 231-year-old Chicago company, struggling with slowing sales in the face of competition from computer encyclopedias, wants to become an E-business-generating revenue from online ads and sales through partnerships with Art.com, Barnesandnoble.
com, and others. Content-distribution services, such as those offered by Akamai, house Web-site data in networks of servers equipped with caching software, taking the load off Web servers and improving performance by locating the content closer to customers.
Several content-delivery service providers sealed deals last week to better position themselves in the market. Digital Island Inc. is merging with caching service provider SandPiper Networks Inc. in a deal worth about $645 million, resulting in a larger caching network. Exodus Communications Inc. is spending $280 million to acquire Service Metrics Inc., a Web-site performance-monitoring company whose infrastructure Exodus will use to extend the reach of its ReadyCache service (see story, p. 197).
Caching is most effective when used with load-balancing software, application-aware switching, and policy-based networking. For businesses, the benefits of caching can be far-reaching. According to Niel Robertson, CTO and co-founder of Service Metrics, companies whose Web sites use caching systems or services to offload rich content can expect noticeable improvements in the time it takes to serve a page. "A site that had taken 10 seconds to serve up a page would improve to five seconds" with caching, Robertson says.
That may be a conservative estimate. Analysis firm NSS Group's benchmarks show that without caching, it can take an average of nearly 14 seconds to get an object over a 64-Kbps connection. That's reduced to less than 7 seconds for the first retrieval after the cache is initialized. Once it's stored, retrieval of the object can be done in less than a second.
By 2003, sales of caching products are expected to increase to more than $2 billion, and companies will spend nearly $4 billion on content-delivery services, according to the Internet Research Group.
"These services are certainly addressing a big point of pain for companies that are struggling to manage their Web servers as the number of hits increases and as performance becomes an important differentiator,'' says Joel Yaffe, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "By using these services, IT managers can focus on adding richer content, such as streaming media, to enhance their Web sites.''
CNN Internet Technologies started using Akamai's service in July as an inexpensive way to speed images to users that access its main home pages, which get more than 500 million page impressions a month, according to Monty Mullig, VP at CNN. Akamai charges $1,995 per megabit per second of content delivered from its network. Mullig says the servers offer another benefit. "When we have a spike in hits from a big news event, we can spread hits across our servers in Atlanta and the ones on Akamai's network,'' he says.
Apparel vendor J. Crew is also using Akamai's service to disperse content-some 2 Gbytes of images of the 500 items it sells from its Web site-to consumers. By housing the image files in numerous caches around the country, they can be delivered faster, says J. Crew director of new media Brian Sugar. "We can give our customers a better experience with our site," he says. "It's a no-brainer that an image will be delivered faster if it's stored close to the customer."
The benefits are similar for electronic supply chains. By storing data frequently accessed by suppliers, companies will be able to improve business partners' response times. "Caching will play an increasingly important role as companies move more business processes to the Web," says Smita Deshpande, Novell's director of Internet solutions. "If you streamline the business process, and accelerate the time it takes to complete a process, you're much more likely to retain trading partners."
Businesses are also looking to caching technology to limit the number of Web servers supporting external Web sites and to reduce the traffic from internal users on the Internet. Delta Air Lines Inc. caches information its employees often access from the Internet, using CacheFlow appliances.
"We're seeing about 65% of Web requests handled directly from our caching devices," says Mark Kraieski, director of electronic commerce services at Delta Technology Inc., in Atlanta. Those requests and the pages that are returned never actually traverse Delta's Internet connection, so the company doesn't have to upgrade to larger, more-expensive circuits. Kraieski says the additional servers, firewalls, and switches required if he didn't use caching would have amounted to several times the cost of the CacheFlow equipment.
CacheFlow has plans to integrate Secure Computing Corp.'s and Websense Inc.'s filtering software into its caching appliances, so they can block requests for URLs defined by network managers. Other vendors are introducing more feature-rich products as well. Inktomi will ship its E-5000 caching software for large companies, which sells for $20,000, and E-200 caching software for branch and remote offices, priced at $5,000.
Novell's Internet Caching System 1.1, released last week, includes application programming interfaces that work with content distribution services from Akamai and Edgix Inc. Novell has also started testing for interoperability with ICS and ArrowPoint Communications Inc.'s Web switches. The companies say caching performance can be quadrupled by using a cache engine and a switch that recognizes and directs different types of content.
Cisco's acquisition of Tasmania Network Systems for $25 million in stock will result in the inclusion of Tasmania's caching software in Cisco's Cache Engine 500 appliances. As a result, those devices will handle more transactions per second and more concurrent connections than currently, says Cisco product manager John Yen. This week, Cisco will disclose plans to start embedding caching, load balancing and quality of service functions into its equipment and software, under its Content Networking initiative.
Caching is also proving increasingly critical for building scalable intranets. By placing a caching device in a remote site with a few hundred users, commonly accessed data can be stored locally, rather than requiring page requests to travel over a WAN. Seattle law firm Perkins Coie LLP uses CacheFlow appliances to reduce Web traffic over WAN circuits. Freeing bandwidth for messaging was crucial, says senior technical analyst Nate Lynch: "E-mail traffic is much more important. Much of our business is conducted through E-mail."
But the potential to dramatically increase Web response times for users, customers, and business partners, even as Internet sites add bandwidth-busting features, remains a key reason why businesses are beginning to employ more aggressive caching strategies. Says Giga analyst Yaffe, "Enhancing Web sites with feature-rich content has a bigger business value than worrying about content distribution." |
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