InformationWeek

August 23, 1999

Built To Scale:
Akamai Serves Up Faster Web Content

Illustration by Jane Marinsky/SIS erving up large Web pages is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks that large E-commerce sites face. This is precisely the problem addressed by Freeflow, a service offered by Akamai Technologies Inc., a global distributor of Internet content.

Akamai's solution: Replicate customer content at its 55 data centers in 15 countries to optimize the retrieval of customer Web data. When users go to a site of an Akamai Web client, such as clothing retailer J. Crew, their first page will come from Jcrew.com, but that page will have objects and links that refer to an Akamai server located near the user. The result is that users retrieve subsequent content much faster.

Akamai doesn't host any of its customers' back-end processing systems, however. "J. Crew has a back-end transaction processing architecture that we aren't involved with, but what we've helped them do is put their entire catalog online and serve a global audience more quickly and reliably than they could with just their Internet connection," says Kieran Taylor, senior product manager for Freeflow.

Akamai's impressive client list, including Disney. com, Espn.com, Furniture.com, Idealab.com, Warnerbrothers.com, and Yahoo.com, doesn't seem bothered by the cost: $2,000 a month for 1 Mbps of Web content served. To back up its performance claims, Akamai guarantees it can serve up content faster than the customer and will do it 100% of the time. If Akamai fails, Taylor says, the customer typically gets a refund for that day.

Return to main story, "Built To Scale."

Illustration by Jane Marinsky/SIS

Back to This Week's Issue