Up Close and Personal

Posted 11/01/2001

Up Close and Personal
CDNs Push Content, Processing Closer to Users

By Paula Bernier

Content delivery network (CDN) operators and product suppliers in the caching and content distribution arena are trying to get closer to their customers on two fronts. They're pushing processing power and content to the outskirts of the network to make better use of network assets and offer customers better delivery time. At the same time, they're moving to enable more targeted content delivery.

For example, content delivery network operator Akamai Technologies Inc. recently rolled out a service called EdgeSuite, which allows businesses to minimize their web infrastructure by pushing software services, content and business logic closer to their end users. Akamai product manager Signe Furlong says electronics retailer Best Buy is using EdgeSuite to help prepare for its expected e-business holiday rush.

"They felt their infrastructure couldn't support potential spikes in traffic," Furlong says, adding that EdgeSuite addresses traffic on a number of fronts.

EdgeSuite can deliver the whole site, including HTML images, to the end user. Or, it can employ business logic with dynamic assembly, using edge side includes (ESI) to tag content based on the end user, that user's geographical location or other factors.

For example, a retailer like L.L. Bean Inc. can identify web site visitors by their location, allowing it to target promotions for winter coats to visitors from New England, while it pushes deals for bathing suits to Southerners who visit its web site.

EdgeSuite also gets information on web site visitors based on "cookies," a computer program that looks at the user's hard drive to gain insight into that person's past behavior online. This method could be used, as one example, in a business-to-business application in which a supplier wanted to give a distributor access to only certain products in its portfolio.

The product enables Akamai customers to keep track of customers' purchases and activities.

"The benefit of EdgeSuite is it's intelligently driven and managed so it gets to business applications and not just further build out of infrastructure," Furlong says. "The enterprises are just starting to get into web applications. The control and the intelligence helps them move further on to the Internet, so I think this will help them drive more traffic."

In the future, he says, Akamai expects to push more processing and application and web serving to the edge.

Hot Links

Pushing processing to the edge clearly has its benefits, says Tim Wilson, chief marketing officer at Digital Island Inc., a Cable & Wireless company. For three years Digital Island has been offering 2DELIVER, a service similar to Akamai's recently announced EdgeSuite.

"But what we're really working on is building services" to allow customers to link to more resources by employing application processing interfaces and technologies like extensible markup language, Wilson adds.

"We already do geographic ad profiling," he says, referring to activities such as the L.L. Bean example. "So there are parts of the puzzle coming together now."

But Digital Island wants to expand on that theme by offering customers other capabilities such as enabling a geographic targeting module to connect with a module for advertisements and link that to a database of customer information and also have the ability to look up cookies.

"There is lots of hype about how do I build APIs or function calls between different modules that can be assembled to do new things," Wilson says, adding that he expects at least some of the hype to become reality.

As for edge processing, Wilson says it could be beneficial in business to consumer applications with potential flash audience problems.

A flash audience is a large group that appears for a particular web event, such as a Victoria's Secret fashion show, and can overload the network's infrastructure. But putting content and application logic at various points closer to customer groups means the content and network resources are shared among fewer people, so performance problems aren't as likely to become an issue, Wilson explains.

Of course, putting resources at the edge also can be useful in business-to-business or intrabusiness applications where the focus is more on performance and making the best use of network infrastructure.

Inktomi Corp., one of Digital Island's equipment suppliers, offers a product called Traffic Core that enables such applications, says Miles Kelly, Inktomi's senior marketing intelligence manager.

Traffic Core sits at the core of network and can take a single file and cache it at the edge of the network so multiple end users can access that stream. The product can be used to distribute and control either general-purpose streaming applications targeting the public-at-large or streaming applications for purposes like corporate training or annual meetings for a particular company.

Corporate applications such as web streaming are becoming a key focus for CDN operators, which are moving away from simply attempting to offer better performance to end users visiting particular web sites, adds Peter Cellarius, vice president of marketing for Intelligent Internet Web systems at Nortel Networks Ltd.

"Corporate customers want an upgrade path from bandwidth savings to on-net streaming," Cellarius says. "On-net streaming means as an enterprise I can have a site that serves streaming content, which can be located at one site [rather than sending an individual stream to each user at a site]. So you need a personal content manager to manage the content; and you need personal content caches with native support for streaming."

Nortel supports personal content cache with native support for QuickTime already and this month plans to add that support for RealNetworks and Microsoft products.

Pick and Choose

While distributing content and processing power clearly makes sense in several applications, it isn't the answer in all cases, says Digital Island's Wilson.

Anything database-intensive, such as an application in which a user would access an airline's database to get a seat number on a plane, can't be distributed, he says.

Digital Island is working with Sony to decide how to cache and distribute movies-on-demand while managing digital rights, he adds.

That points to the fact that content delivery network operators and their customers need to decide how much content and intelligence to put at the edge based on network realities and application requirements.

"It varies with application design and cost," says Wilson. "If the network is free, put [processing] at the core. If the network is expensive, put it at the edge. Networks tend to be more expensive overseas."

Companies often elect to put some content and processing at the edge while other content stays at its web site of origin. For example, a company named Legal Resource Network (LRN), which provides legal research to corporate law departments, puts CacheFlow Inc. equipment at its customer locations so customers get better response time and realize access bandwidth savings as they call up frequently accessed data, which sits at that local site.

The customers might also decide they occasionally want to access other LRN data, so LRN stores that data in a central site.

In other news, Loudcloud is offering Expertise, a set of services developed in response to the enterprise customer's need to evaluate, re-architect and migrate their Internet sites to state of the art technology. The Expertise services are focused around assessing an enterprise's existing Internet site operations and designing highly scalable Internet sites.