I guess I should have used the word peeping, anyway, she looked pretty good today, Anyone willing to venture a guess on how the INTC news will effect us tomorrow?
The following may have added to our good fortune today-->
( BW)(F5-LABS) Real Broadcast Network Selects F5 Labs To Handle Growing
Broadcast Load; Scalable BIG/ip Technology Guarantees Visitors Receive
Their
Programming
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1998--F5 Labs, Inc., a provider
of innovative Server
Array Controller technology, today announced that RealNetworks' Real
Broadcast Network has
selected F5's BIG/ip to improve availability to their broadcasts and
live-media programming over the
Internet. The scalable BIG/ip will be used to intelligently allocate
Internet and intranet service requests
across the Real Broadcast Network as needed.
"The Internet is incredibly appealing to broadcasters, making
entertainment, instructional and
advertising content available to an entirely new audience" said Jeffrey
Payne, general manager of
Broadcast Operations for RealNetworks' Real Broadcast Network. "By
leveraging the power of
RealAudio and RealVideo, the Real Broadcast Network delivers interactive
audio and video
programming to audiences worldwide."
The Real Broadcast Network provides the industry-leading service for
delivering broadcasts and other
streaming media over the Internet. The Real Broadcast Network (RBN) is a
technological breakthrough
brought about by a partnership between RealNetworks and MCI. With RBN,
customers can reach large
audiences with live concerts, product launches, shareholder meetings and
streaming advertisements.
How the Real Broadcast Network Works
To capture and retain audiences, RBN must ensure a superior end-user
experience. This entails
maximizing the quality of service with a scalable, upgradeable turnkey
network while keeping costs at a
minimum.
To achieve these goals, RealNetworks and MCI designed a distributed
splitter network of media
servers strategically located across the country. Content enters the
network at the Broadcast Operations
Center (BOC), and is routed to RealServer Splitter sites which
re-transmit the live streams to the end
user.
The splitter sites offer a platform for scalable network capacity
and reduce the packet loss and signal
fragmentation that come from the traditional unicast
"one-server-to-the-world" broadcast approach.
When a user clicks on a link to RBN-hosted material, software at the
Broadcast Operations Center
resolves the request into the splitter URL that provides the optimal
feed to the client. This procedure,
called "content resolution," optimizes signal quality, ensures optimal
load balancing, and increases
likelihood that no user will be denied access until the network is truly
full.
Because Internet events begin at set times, the traffic at the
Broadcast Operations Center can see a
huge and sudden increase in demand when visitors "crush in the doors."
During these peaks, the number
of transactions can suddenly jump from five per second to over 100 per
second. To provide the load
balancing required for the critical hand-off from the Broadcast
Operations Center to the splitters, RBN is
installing two of F5's BIG/ip systems. Each will initially control four
Pentium II - 233 MHz Web servers.
The scalable BIG/ip architecture will allow scaling up the number of
servers as demand increases.
"Our goal is to use BIG/ip to provide both scalability and
reliability," comments Payne. "In our
environment, every click has got to work. We not only need to meet our
internal goals, but also offer a
very high level of performance to our customers."
Payne estimates the current capacity of RBN is 50,000 concurrent
users. He plans to expand this to
100,000 shortly after installing the BIG/ip. "We simply did not see any
systems on the market that could
satisfy our need for scalability, performance, and reliability as well
as the BIG/ip," adds Payne. "We feel
with the BIG/ip we can better meet our customers' performance
expectations."
About BIG/ip
BIG/ip is a dedicated Server Array Controller that intelligently
allocates Internet and intranet service
requests across a group of inexpensive, network servers. Residing
between the Internet routers and an
array of servers, BIG/ip continually monitors each server for
application availability and performance. On
the other end, it oversees all incoming Web queries and automatically
directs each service request to the
most appropriate and available server for subsequent processing. By
balancing all of the incoming Web
requests across the content servers, the product substantially reduces
the number of server failures due to
overload conditions.
By detecting application, server, and network failures in advance
and routing service requests
accordingly, the product essentially guarantees fail-safe, timely
responses to user queries. Moreover,
BIG/ip stands alone due to the fact that the product itself has
complete, built-in redundancy.
Consequently, there is no single point of failure along the entire path,
from backbone to server.
About F5 Labs, Inc.
F5 Labs, Inc., is a privately held software company that develops
and markets server array controller
technologies enabling organizations to provide reliable, consistent
access to their mission critical Internet
and intranet applications through the fail-safe use of scalable content
servers. The company is
headquartered in Seattle, WA, and is located on the Web at www.f5.com.
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