Max - FYI some FFIV mining
Tiny F5 Networks Takes on Job
Of a Traffic Cop for the Internet
By BILL RICHARDS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SEATTLE -- When John Glenn hurtled into space for the second time, the 77-year-old then-senator wasn't the only one braced for shock waves.
As Sen. Glenn blasted into orbit last November, millions of watchers crowded to NASA's Web site (www.nasa.gov) to follow the flight by simulcast. At F5 Networks Inc. (www.f5.com), a tiny software company here charged with maintaining the electronic traffic flow to the NASA site, officials watched tensely as a trickle of visitors mounted to a torrent of 29 million in just six hours.
"We were pretty worried," concedes Steven Goldman, F5's sales and marketing vice president. NASA's last try at demonstrating its prowess over the Internet, for the Mars Pathfinder landing, turned into something of a public-relations disaster for the agency when its Web site faltered under the crush of viewers. "This time," says Mr. Goldman, whose company wasn't involved in the Pathfinder debacle, "we helped them pull it off."
Coping with sudden explosions of Web activity has become a touchy and growing problem for Web sites and their service providers. And the traffic jams are likely to get worse as growing numbers of consumers move onto the Internet, analysts say. That has made traffic management one of the hottest parts of the data-communications industry, a $130 million market that more than doubled in the last year.
Nightmare Buster
Jeffrey Hussey, F5's chairman, chief executive and president, says his company is building a three-tier traffic-management system that will help companies avoid traffic nightmares. F5, which was founded in 1996 and recently filed plans to go public, has built up an impressive customer list, including Microsoft Corp.'s e-commerce unit, Alaska Airlines and Internet-service providers such as At Home Corp. and PSINet Inc., which handled NASA's site for Sen. Glenn's flight.
Michael Mael, PSINet's vice president for applications and Web services, says conventional traffic management would have been "too clunky" to handle Sen. Glenn's flight. With F5, he says, "we were able to take the data and pass it around more efficiently."
The core of F5's system is BIG/ip, a traffic-management appliance whose software assesses a Web site's server cluster and then efficiently distributes traffic to the site. Think traffic cop, with BIG/ip standing in the middle of the Internet intersection, spotting congestion, moving traffic around overloaded streets and getting everything to its intended destination.
F5 expanded BIG/ip's role early last year, adding a broader traffic manager called 3DNS to the system. Like BIG/ip, it directs traffic, but on a wider geographic scale. If an Internet service provider's servers are bottled up in Memphis, Tenn., for example, 3DNS senses the tie-up and directs the traffic to another company server cluster in Portland, Ore.
Real-Time Distribution
The third, and unique, leg of the system is global/Site, which will distribute evolving content -- like the progress of Sen. Glenn's flight -- in real time to all servers in the network at once. The company plans to begin shipping global/Site this summer. Up to now, the lack of that flexibility has been an Achilles' heel for Internet sites. Rapidly expanding numbers of users, all seeking access to constantly changing flows of information, have caused meltdowns, leaving users with busy signals.
Currently, big Internet-networking software companies cope with such massive traffic loads in different ways. Inktomi Corp., for example, caches information at various server sites, then periodically updates those caches with new information, which lets Internet sites appear fresh while requiring less bandwidth than would be needed to constantly update a site's entire information load.
"Caching is useful when you want to present people with history, such as yesterday's sports scores," says F5's Mr. Hussey. In contrast, global/Site, he says, will enable large user groups to follow real-time play-by-play action during the World Cup or the Super Bowl.
Other networking companies -- such as Cisco Systems Inc., traffic management's big gorilla, with more than 50% of the market's revenue -- direct traffic to Web sites' servers. But Cisco's traffic-management system, called "Local Director," doesn't analyze the content of the "packets" of Internet traffic it is distributing and can't direct specific information to an individual server. F5 says its global/Site system will have that ability.
Beyond 'Packet-Switching'
"Packet-switching is the core of Cisco's business, but small companies like F5 are going beyond that capability," says Peter Christy, a principal at Collaborative Research, a Los Altos, Calif., Internet-marketing-research company. For example, Mr. Christy says F5's system would allow a big Web-site operator, such as, say, Fidelity Investments, to prioritize messages during peak-traffic periods, giving preference to paying customers over other users simply seeking information.
Cisco says it doesn't comment on rivals, especially start-ups such as F5. But a spokeswoman for the networking company assures, "We are well aware of what our competitors are doing."
In any event, analysts such as Collaborative's Mr. Christy say a likely scenario is that F5 will get scooped up by one of the major networking concerns, such as Cisco, Lucent Technologies Inc. or Sun Microsystems Inc. "In the long haul," says Ted Julian, an Internet analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., "I have a hard time envisioning them as an independent player."
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Also NEON looks interesting, after the smoke clears. I had a good position trade in it early april to end of that month 35->48 or so.
regards,
dkg
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