March 27, 2000, Issue: 779
Section: INFRASTRUCTURE
Catching On To The Advantages Of Caching
MITT JONES
Among the types of thin servers making waves in large companies are caching
appliances. Simply put, these devices afford much faster Internet response
time and reduce bandwidth consumption by storing frequently accessed Web
content on-site.
Companies such as CacheFlow, Cisco Systems, and Network Appliance
have dominated the caching appliance market. They initially focused on
service providers, which typically make liberal use of such servers to provide
subscribers fast access to information. But as the idea caught on, major
vendors such as Compaq have introduced caching appliances of their own,
betting that their enterprise know-how will pay off big. Customers "want a
vendor that's going to have a common management framework across their
appliances," says John Young, Compaq's VP for TaskSmart Servers. They
also want a framework "that plugs back into their standard management
tools," he says.
Installing a caching appliance is nearly a plug-and-play operation, says Eric
Jorgensen, LAN services team leader for Southwest Airlines Co. "You just
give it an IP address and a name and plug it in, and that's it," he says.
Jorgensen installed two Compaq TaskSmart C-2000 caching appliances to
speed access for 2,500 to 3,000 networked PCs.
Jorgensen says he likes the reporting and optimization features the product
provides. "I use reporting software to identify the top 10 to 20 sites for a given
week and then schedule the TaskSmart to download those Web sites in their
entirety during off-peak hours." This has helped Southwest Airlines achieve
remarkable cache hit rates with its caching appliances-from 55% to 65%, he
says. "We're actually serving up about 4 Gbytes of data from these boxes a
day," he says, decreasing users' need to go to the Net. Partially as a result, the
two T1 lines that serve the 3,000 or so PCs are being used less, he says.
Adding more communications links "is something we don't have to worry
about now, and that's a cost that never goes away," Jorgensen says.
Jorgensen was using a software cache product on a general-purpose server
before moving up to the caching appliances. "There were a lot of bugs and
other problems such as users' not being able to access some sites," he says.
"But the bigger draw of this hardware solution was the easy fault tolerance it
allowed." Jorgensen clustered his two TaskSmart servers, so a hot spare
takes over seamlessly if the active server goes down.
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