Bringing IP VPNs to The Next Level

As in so many areas of communications services today, it has become popular in the content distribution network arena to move toward offering higher-level, aka value-added, services.

Akamai says its EdgeSuite flagship offering, which in the third quarter of 2002 accounted for 39 percent of revenue (and more than 36 percent in the second quarter), positions it well to capture and keep higher-tier customers. EdgeSuite is an integrated suite of technologies for content and application delivery, content targeting and personalization, business intelligence and streaming media. It enables secure, scalable and reliable assembly and delivery of Web sites, business applications and Web services via the Internet, explains Akamai spokesman Jeff Young. EdgeSuite also includes separate components that can provide business intelligence information on site usage, target content based on geography or network information, or cloak the origin site for protection from DDOS attacks. In the first 18 months of availability for the service, Akamai announced it had captured more than 29 customers, with an average revenue per customer of $20,200 per month.

Smaller provider Mirror Image Internet also is among those working to swim upstream.

"We're trying to move away from classical CDN to a smart overlay network and do transactional applications on top of that platform," says Bob Hammond, CTO with Mirror Image Internet. The company, which is principally owned by Xcelera Inc., "will move rapidly" to do that beginning in the fourth quarter of 2002, he says.

Network Implications

Karl Douglas, CEO of equipment vendor WARP Solutions, says as more transactional applications move onto the Internet, the traditional CDN architectures, which were built to handle static information, are being challenged.

WARP says its ADN (Application Distribution Network) architecture, based on the company's 2063 and 2063e application preprocessor appliances, enables telcos and other network operators to better address transactional applications like supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and customer resource management, which are all being deployed in increasing numbers. The 2063 is a 2U 19-inch rack box that sits between the Web server and the application server. The 2063e sits in front of Web servers to enable content distribution. The boxes sell for $80,000 retail and each one can handle 900 transactions per second and can support multiple customers. The company's products currently are used by C&W and NTT/ Verio, among others.

This year WARP also plans to announce the Edge Transaction Router, a global load balancer that determines the shortest and most efficient route based on an incoming query; the WARP Performance Cluster, a peer-to-peer local load balancer for the origin site; and the TSM (transaction session manager), which allows the network operator to distribute the rights across multiple databases wherever they are. The products are scheduled to be available in the second or third quarter.

"We've seen the deployment of critical applications -- ERP, SAP, .NET over the Internet," says Douglas. "Those applications are not capable of being optimized over a traditional CDN. You need to support dynamic data."

WARP's existing products support dynamic data by offloading traffic from application and data servers and eliminate duplicate database dips, says Douglas, adding those measures allow for faster response times to Internet user requests and more efficient use of network infrastructure. For example, a company like Ford might have 10,000 dealerships, which generate several hundred requests a day for the same inventory information, says Douglas. Rather than pulling the same inventory from the database each time, WARP equipment monitors that data at the database layer so it can reuse data, he says. Perhaps more importantly, however, WARP's products give existing servers in the network the horsepower they need to quickly process a large number of transactions.

Douglas says about a year ago Akamai and Oracle introduced a new architecture to support more transactional applications. However, he says there are code-level changes the customer needs to make new applications work with the network. WARP CTO Greg Parker explains Akamai requires URLs to be encoded in a proprietary way. This means if the Akamai network goes down, the network can't resolve the URL. It also means the user has to pull apart its code, do insertion of dynamic components and redo their proofs of concept, he says, adding "it's quite intrusive... and time consuming."

Whatever the service, Mirror Image Internet and Speedera claim their network architectures give them a clear advantage over the Akamai network.

While Akamai operates a highly distributed network comprising about 12,900 servers in 1,100 networks in 66 countries, Mirror Image, with 20 caches worldwide, has centralized its computing resources. "We can serve more customers more cheaply because we're centralized," says Alexander Vik, CEO of Mirror Image. He says centralizing information means its systems don't waste time searching for information on a remote server. "We always knew that the last mile would get better and that the aggregation would get better as well," says Hammond of Mirror Image Internet.

Speedera, meanwhile, has a patented Global Traffic Management System technology, which enables it to route customer content requests to the optimal server in real time, says Gordon Smith, Speedera's vice president of marketing. That and other cost control measures Speedera has implemented enable the company to offer its customers services at a 30 percent to 50 percent savings over Akamai's, says Smith.

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