Service provider lightens load for e-tailers - Akamai Technologies Inc e-commerce services - Company Business and Marketing

CommunicationsWeek International, Dec 13, 1999 by Sheridan Nye

Content distribution technology should give U.S. on-line retailers a realistic chance of surviving the Web shopping frenzy this Christmas.

E-commerce Web sites are bracing themselves for an on-line spending spree over the U.S. holiday season, and content distribution companies are stepping forward to take the strain on their behalf.

According to Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, consumers will buy an unprecedented $4 billion-worth of goods from "e-tail" Web sites between Thanksgiving and New Year. "Many e-commerce sites will be overwhelmed by mobs of Internet-empowered consumers." warned Forrester analyst Carl Howe in a report, Shop-and-Go Holiday eCommerce.

But e-tailers can do more than crossing their fingers and hoping their infrastructure will cope.

Freeing up servers

Founded in August 1998, Akamai Technologies Inc., also of Cambridge, has built up its network of 1,700 FreeFlow servers in 30 countries through partnerships with more than 100 network providers. By pushing heavy and frequently requested Web objects such as images and third-party advertising out to the edge of the network onto local servers, e-tailers can speed delivery and free up their own servers to handle basic HTML pages and the all-important transaction process.

"The right way to build a fast network is not to use the network," said Peter Christy, vice president of research at Internet Research Group, of Los Altos, California.

Akamai claims it can speed Web-page delivery anywhere from two- to tenfold. For $1,995 per megabyte, per month, Akamai bypasses Net congestion by moving content closer to the end user via strategically placed local servers. Its edge over competitors, it says, lies in the scale of its network, and in its patented applied mathematics originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Algorithms determine the optimal server to deliver a particular request, based on real-time conditions on the Internet and the measured load on each FreeFlow server.

ARLs, not URLs

To "Akamaize" HTML pages, the Web-site manager simply runs the original HTML through a utility program, selecting objects whose URLs will be replaced with Akamai Resource Locators (ARLs). Clicking on an ARL prompts the Internet Domain Name System to return an IP address to the browser that points to the Akamai network and to the most appropriate FreeFlow server, according to network conditions, that is free to deliver that content.

Designer fashion and furniture store, Bluefly.com, of New York, is using Akamai to protect its home servers against peak traffic over the holiday season by off-loading 100% of its Web-site graphics to the FreeFlow network.

"If we make 20%-40% savings on CPU time per server that's ultimately 20%-40% fewer servers I have to buy," said Andreas Turanski, vice president, technology, Bluefly.com.

Akamai's is not the only solution. Digital Island Inc., of San Francisco, a supplier of managed Web hosting services, recently merged with content distributor Sandpiper Networks, of Thousand Oaks, California, and now offers a comprehensive package of protected data centers, intelligent networking, content management and distribution via Sandpiper's 1,200 replication servers.

Another option available to e-tailers is to rely on ISPs to host hardware and software caches-provided through specialists such as Inktomi Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.--that hold and automatically update frequently requested content. Or, at the supply end of the network, a content provider or its hosting company can set up a server accelerator--a proxy cache that stands in for a group of servers as a buffer in front of the originating server or cluster.

Jonathan Seelig, Akamai co-founder and vice president of strategy and corporate development, said his company is committed to owning server hardware, rather than simply licensing its algorithm technology, as this gives it a level of control over how and where servers are sited at key Internet intersections.