DS, Hi! Please read the following lengthy article from The Fool thread and give me your opinion about Akamai as a company and as a threat to NTAP. The author, Dwight Gibbs, was just featured in an article in the October '99 Issue of Networking Magazine focusing on their decision to use NTAP filers at The Motley Fool. The following states that he is replacing his NTAP filers with Akamai. What is the potential that this could be more wide spread. This is confusing given Friday's report from PaineWebber regarding competition.
Best,
Duncan
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<<Author: TMFDwight Number: of 439
Hey Gang,
I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone on this board. However, a few people have asked me how the Fool came to use Akamai. If you are interested, keep reading. If not, click the Next link above.
Like some others on this board, I am AlwaysSkeptical. No - wait!! I'm TMFDwight, but I am also always skeptical ;). So when I initially heard about Akamai about a year ago, I was pretty dubious –
“Oh great!! A couple of academics are going to solve the problem of congestion on the Internet??!! Yah – right. Sure they will. Then they'll spin lead into gold. They should go back to their theoretical world of academia and leave the real world to the rest of us.”
I figured Akamai was either going to be a miserable failure or they would fake out a lot of gullible people with smoke and mirrors and be marginally successful. I didn't think much about Akamai after that. That is until Earl Galleher called me.
Earl used to run Digex. The Fool used to host our web site with Digex. That is how I know Earl. He's a good guy – bright, personable, and direct. He's an honest straight shooter for whom I have quite a bit of respect. Earl is now the Vice President of Sales and Distribution for Akamai. For more info, check out akamai.com. When Earl called and asked to talk to me about Akamai, I was still completely skeptical. But it was Earl so I agreed to talk. He brought a couple of guys from Akamai with him, one whom was Tony Falco (another Digex alum). I listened to Earl and Tony and the story sounded compelling but I was still incredulous. After all - this was a difficult problem they were talking about solving. I needed more information.
So Earl had Danny Lewin fly down from Cambridge to Fool HQ to conduct a technical briefing. Danny is the CTO of Akamai and quite an impressive techie (http://www.akamai.com/company/dlewin.html). He's a very cool, personable guy who also happens to be incredibly sharp – unbelievably sharp. Despite this, I and the rest of technical web brain trust of the Fool (known as the Web Bozos) were prepared to rip Danny apart. It didn't happen. Danny knew his stuff and had solid answers to all of our questions. He walked us through what Akamai was doing and how the technology worked. For the benefit of those of us who are not algorithmic geniuses, Danny explained the overall concepts and then drilled down into the actual implementation, at times speaking English ;). I would love to give more detail but we signed one of those pesky NDA's, limiting the amount of information I can disclose. Suffice to say, after more than three hours of presentation and Q&A, we were much less dubious. We were thinking that this Akamai thing might actually work. But we wanted to see some proof. So we decided to do a very limited test.
We decided to serve a single graphic on the Fool site using Akamai - the Elvis graphic on the message boards (the jester in the top left corner). To check the performance, we used SiteScope from Fool HQ and Keynote (www.keynote.com). OK – this is where someone chimes in and says, “Keynote is not perfect. They don't use agents on every backbone out there. And they do not generate enough data to make any test statistically valid. Just to name a few problems.” I agree that Keynote is not perfect. However, it is the best (or least worst, depending on your POV) tool we have at our disposal. So that is what we use to do our tests.
We set up the test to monitor the Elvis graphic on our IIS servers and on the Akamai network. OK – now someone should chime in with, “You're using Microsoft NT and IIS and they suck. You should be using Unix for best performance.” With that in mind, we also loaded the Elvis graphic on one of our Network Appliance Filers (an F720). The NetApp boxes run BSD stripped down to its file serving guts with a powerful file system called WAFL. The NetApp boxes are meant to do nothing but serve files really, really fast. For more info, check out netapp.com. We tested the performance of Akamai, IIS, and the NetApp for a couple of weeks. IIS came in last place in terms of performance and reliability. The NetApp was a little better. Akamai was significantly better – at times eight to ten times faster than the other two platforms. Basically – Akamai rocked. So we decided to expand the test a bit. We used to Akamai to serve all the graphics on the message boards.
The results were good but there were some problems. Sometimes Akamaized graphics would not paint. Other times they painted very slowly. At these times, we de-Akamaized all of our content, serving all of our graphics with our NetApp filer or IIS servers.
To Akamai's credit, they attacked each and every problem not resting until it was solved. I received several emails from Tom Leighton (Akamai's chief scientist - akamai.com and Danny Lewin as well as several others at Akamai in the wee hours of the morning reporting on the progress they were making tracking down problems. This actually leads to two important points that influenced our decision to work with Akamai:
1. Akamai's customer service is excellent.
Whenever we have had a question or a problem, Akamai has responded quickly and thoroughly, providing detailed explanations as to what went wrong, what was done to correct the problem, and what steps were taken to make sure that the problem did not happen again. In addition, Akamai's customer care staff has responded to every Fool customer who has posted on our boards or sent email saying that s/he is having problems retrieving Akamaized content. Happily most customers are happy to help Akamai troubleshoot problems. There have been a few who were downright rude when Akamai contacted them. Despite this, as far as I know, every Fool customer has received good service from Akamai
I should also mention that our customer rep at Akamai (Finula Keady) is Da Bomb. She is on top of every problem and issue, often catching them before we do. And most importantly she is proactive and responsive. We could not ask for more from Finula.
2. Akamai's staff is uniformly and consistently honest.
Whenever there has been a problem with the Akamai network, the staff at Akamai has been quite honest about the cause of the problem. Tom Leighton has actually said the words, “We screwed up.” It is quite refreshing to see a vendor actually admit to problems & mistakes and take responsibility. When this has happened, Tom has also been the guy to send the email explaining what happened and what was done to fix the problem. I would love it if all the vendors we worked with were that honest and up front. This bodes quite well for Akamai. I should probably add that there have not been any major problems with the Akamai network in the last couple of months.
Now back to our story.
As I mentioned, there were a couple of glitches in the first few weeks of our test. However, the subsequent weeks were pretty much trouble free. Given that, after a little over a month of testing, we rolled Akamai out across the entire Fool site. I have been very pleased with the results. We have seen high levels of availability (usually 100%) and speedy downloads from Akamai (much faster than our IIS and NetApp servers). Currently just about every graphic on the US and UK Fool web sites is served from the Akamai network. The next step is to Akamaize FoolMart.
So that is a bit about how we tested and rolled out Akamai. I am still working on a few other posts. Ideally I'll get to them tomorrow. I hope this is somewhat useful/interesting. If not, my apologies for wasting your time.
DISCLAIMER: I am long AKAM so feel free to take this with a boulder of salt. However, I bought the stock because I believe in the company. I do not believe in the company simply because I bought the stock.
Fool On,
Dwight
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Dwight J. Gibbs
Chief Techie Geek
The Motley Fool |
