Can cacheing be turned into cash? ……………………(sorry)
In re-reading the caching article, the high end use forecast struck my eye:
In fact, it's the rare enterprise-level Webmaster who isn't considering a cache, according to Collaborative Research, a Los Altos, CA market-research firm. The company predicts that the entire caching
market will exceed $4 billion by the year 2002, as caches become
commonplace in the enterprise-network and ISP markets.
Also something about which I was not aware of at the U of CO in BOULDER, BOULDER that is:
Caching is certainly nothing new. The Harvest Cache from the computer science departments at the University of Southern California and the University of Colorado at Boulder was a pioneer in this field and still exists on many Web sites. A group of volunteers is still maintaining Harvest--version 1.5 can be downloaded from :
tardis.ed.ac.uk
The leading Harvest derivative and proud member of the second generation is NetCache software from Network Appliance. Many
larger corporations including Yahoo! use NetCache to cache data. It
runs on Solaris 2.5, Digital UNIX 3.5 and 4.0, and Windows NT 4.0
(with Service Pack 2) servers.
Inktomi made headlines recently with its eye-popping IPO, largely
because of its Traffic Server cache. The Traffic Server stores, copies, and retrieves network documents, moving information closer to
Internet users. It works on a distributed model and tries to ensure that the same up-to-date documents are stored on all designated Traffic Servers. Traffic Server runs on Sun Microsystems' Solaris servers and costs $19,995 per CPU.
***>> On the hardware level, both CacheFlow and Cisco offer units that are little more than a series of hard drives with a proprietary operating system managing them. The CacheFlow 1000 applies object
orientation to data on the disks, the key being that any object can be
obtained in a single disk read. That, plus some other design issues,
means that the CacheFlow 1000 doesn't slow down dramatically
when trying to wade through almost-full hard drives.
From the above, I note that the existing hardware/software interfaces are proprietary in nature and therefore these solutions do not lend themselves to commoditized suppliers (think barriers to entry and Ampex's product history). It also tells me that, if one were to use this technology in a web hosting service, the web hoster would be as much of a systems integrator as a service bureau.
Ed Perry
PS: Glenn, i will pursue your links next. |
