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December 20/27, 1999

1999 Product Of The Year
CacheFlow's Web-Caching System

Products Of The Year:

Broadvision One-To-One

CacheFlow's Web-Caching System

Red Hat Linux 6.1

Novell Directory Services B

Oracle8i

Network-Based Procurement Services

i2 Technologies' Rhythm

Siebel 99

Four-Way Enterprise Servers

Extensible Markup Language

Hardware Renaissance

Most Important Products of the '90s

Send Us Your Feedback

hile 1999 saw a variety of Internet-related server appliances, few made inroads into corporate America. In many cases, these black boxes tend to constrain how companies deliver and increase their Internet infrastructures. But that's not the case with CacheFlow Inc.'s line of Web-caching systems.

The appeal of these appliances is their simplicity: Relying on a self-tuning, ready-to-run box to provide a specific set of services eases deployment and administrative burdens in complex networks. Increasingly, caching Web content is critical for both enterprises that need to keep their WAN links to the Internet from being overrun by their employees' needs, and for Web-site administrators who must walk the expensive tightrope between having sufficient Web-server capacity to respond to sudden surges in traffic vs. maintaining a more affordable level of service that's sufficient more than 90% of the time.

CacheFlow offers a range of products, from the CacheFlow 110, a lower-cost--but not very expandable--appliance suited for traffic typical to a T1 connection, up to Internet service provider-class systems capable of serving the needs of OC3-level traffic.

All of the products share the company's proprietary CacheOS, which dispenses with the file-system and application layers found in general-purpose operating systems, such as Windows NT and Linux. By focusing strictly on the needs of caching, CacheOS is able to deliver a high-performance, self-tuning appliance that's simple to setup and maintain.

CacheOS, however, isn't merely a more efficient operating system. By automatically refreshing cached objects before users request them, based on an algorithm that monitors both the frequency with which an object is requested and how often it's updated, CacheFlow appliances improve on the hit ratio of more conventional caches. Even when an object can't be served from the cache, the CacheOS automatically begins fetching objects referred to in an HTML page, such as banners and images, as the HTML page itself is being retrieved. This thorough-going approach to caching makes CacheFlow's products better than easier-to-administer solutions; they generally outperform conventional caches, too.

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