Cache & The Q>
/09/99 - Enterprises Cache On
Apr 09, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Caching, a technology long used by ISPs to optimize performance, is expanding
its footprint in enterprises that need to wringmore efficiency from their IP networks and websites.
At the same time, key players with caching-class products are upping the ante. Sandpiper Networks and CacheFlow this week
added features to deliver frequently requested data even faster.
IT managers, particularly those who've benefited from ISP caching, eagerly await the new functions.
"Every page not delivered is money lost," said Jeff Mayzurk, director of systems and network engineering at cable network E
Online. "If the image loads too slowly, users will go away. It's of paramount importance to deliver pages quickly to end users."
Sandpiper will add streaming media support to its Footprint 2.0 distributed information application while CacheFlow said it's adding
performance reporting in version 2.0 of its CacheFlow OS.
The OS, available as a free download to CacheFlow customers next month, will be able to measure the freshness of Web content
delivered to users and provide reports to administrators on a real-time basis. The OS ensures that Web content remains up-to-date
by "pinging" servers on a continuous basis, thus all but eliminating the chance that any stale data will be pumped to users.
E Online uses Sandpiper's Footprint application, which takes clients' data and installs it on Sun Microsystems servers, called
content distributors, that are installed at various locations throughout the Internet. When a user requests a particular page,
Footprint determines the most appropriate distributor from which to route the information. The application is priced anywhere from
$5,000 to $15,000 per month depending on the amount of traffic generated by the user.
Mayzurk said Footprint 2.0, to be rolled out in June, will let E Online increase the amount of live broadcasts it pumps over the Web.
"Putting streams closer to the end user is a major win," he said.
But it's not just video clips or archived audio files creating the need for caching. The advent of so-called "self-service" applications,
geared to employees and customers who need quick access to forms and information via corporate intranets and extranets, should
create a huge demand for cache functionality.
"If companies can get employees to use browsers to permit self-service of internal documents, they get rid of a huge amount of
bureaucracy," said Peter Christy, an analyst with Collaborative Research. "If these kinds of systems can save even a few percent
[of operating budget dollars], that would translate into a huge amount of dollars."
Christy, who in early 1998 predicted enterprise cache spending in 1999 would outpace that of ISPs, has backed off from that
prognostication, but he said he believes enterprise adoption will take off in 2000, once Y2K issues are addressed and more
sophisticated caching products are rolled out.
"Caching was a bit slower than we thought for the enterprise," he said, citing Cisco's widely panned, low-horsepower Cache Engine
as a key factor that soured some potential customers. "That froze a significant number of purchases, but Cisco will be coming out
with a stronger product in the next few months."
Cisco's new enterprise cache product, code-named Robin, was expected to make its debut at last month's National Laboratory for
Applied Network Research cache "bake-off." Organizers said Cisco dropped out before the event; Cisco officials refused comment
on when the product might ship.
Albert Barajas, network architect at Qualcomm, is one IT manager who plans to boost his use of caching as data demands dictate.
"Data now runs just fine across our intranet," he said. "There's a benefit to caching large applications, and we have been doing so
for the past four and a half years."
As internal data demands escalate, Barajas said he would likely extend caching to store corporate data needed by Qualcomm
employees as part of their daily operations. "It would depend on the business need," he said.
Caution is the byword, even with users like E Online. "We certainly recognize the value and performance of caching," said
Mayzurk. "But I still think the technology is pretty young. I think we'll see a lot more mature products coming out of the woodwork
in the next few months. Then we'll sit down and see."
For now, though, many IT managers are getting their first taste of caching through their service providers, which are deploying the
technology to accelerate delivery of Web content to consumers.
"We have struggled to see what we could do to improve our bandwidth," said Kelly Humphries, who manages NASA's popular
Human Space Flight website for the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston.
In the fall of last year, prior to the John Glenn shuttle mission, NASA officials huddled with executives at PSINet to determine
whether outsourcing its website management would eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks and allow Web crawlers to track Glenn's flight
without disruption.
At about the same time, PSINet had concluded a caching study of its own, according to Michael Mael, the PSINet vice president
who oversees the ISP's global hosting centers. "We saw some benefits. One is caching would help us economize as we saw the
load grow in our servers. Second, we saw more demand for interactive capabilities" and believed caching could handle those
requirements, he said.
PSINet used NetCache appliances from Network Appliance to handle the jump in traffic associated with the Glenn flight, which
proved to NASA that outsourcing Web management was indeed the correct approach, Humphries said. This January , NASA
officially shifted all its Space Flight Web activities to PSINet, and in the intervening three months, NASA has recorded more than
300 million hits from users, Humphries said.
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