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March 6, 2000

Content-Delivery Services Can Avert Traffic Jams
Providers can handle excess Web-site demand and let businesses avoid overbuilding networks

By Terry Sweeney

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nformation technology managers who haven't considered content-delivery services may want to heed some advice from a customer sold on the concept. Jordan Olin, chief technology officer of consumer electronics Web site Computer.com Inc., says a content-delivery provider saved the day for his company when it successfully handled a huge volume of traffic during this year's Super Bowl.

Content-delivery services, projected to explode during the next few years, combine far-flung servers and complex routing algorithms to push content out where it needs to be to improve performance for end users.

Computer.com, which launched with TV ads during the Super Bowl, illustrates the value of content-delivery services. The Maynard, Mass., company's IT department thought it had armed the site sufficiently with 5 to 6 Mbps of throughput between servers and load-balancing switches. But Olin decided to use content-delivery providers Akamai Technologies Inc. and Exodus Communications Inc. for backup to prevent a traffic jam like the one experienced by Victoria's Secret when it aired its online fashion show last year.

"We took a 45-Mbps hit for 10 minutes--35 Mbps of those 45 Mbps were handled by Akamai," says Olin, who adds that performance data showed the site was operating at 45,000 sessions per second. "Our processors were already up in the 85% range when we hit that spike. Our servers would have melted. Akamai performed flawlessly and saved my butt."

By using content-delivery services, IT departments can protect Web sites against "flash" traffic, or that which comes out of nowhere, quickly clogs a site, and then disappears. Customers also avoid the cost of hardware they won't use all the time and can track performance with a browser.

The Super Bowl experience of Computer.com is not uncommon, especially since there are no reliable ways to predict how Web users are going to respond to ads, incentives, contests, news events, natural disasters--all of which have triggered server meltdowns in the past.

Jordan Olin Photo by Stephen Sherman Service providers such as Akamai, Adero Communications, Digital Island, Exodus, and Sandpiper Communications (now part of Digital Island) have pioneered the concept of distributing traffic out to the edges of their international server networks. Content delivery has come to mean any combination of caching, load balancing, and routing IP packets. Content-delivery service providers typically include some sort of measurement and analysis tool, often accessible via the Web, so customers can see and measure the performance gain they get.

Until these services became available in 1998, IT managers had little choice but to overequip their networks to the extent their budgets would permit. And the budget usually doesn't go far, considering the costs involved with overbuilding networks: Additional servers cost $40,000 or more; caching, load-balancing, and Web-switching hardware starts at about $7,000 and skyrockets from there; management packages can cost as much as $100,000; and monthly fees for several high-speed connections to multiple Internet service providers can cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

"You could either throw bandwidth at the problem or buy proxy servers and storage," says Tim Wilson, VP of marketing at Digital Island, a Web-hosting and content-delivery company. "Bandwidth is easier but it's more expensive, so a market has emerged that arbitrages the problem with a set of storage servers and processors at the edge that push content closer to end users. It provides better performance at a lower cost to those serving up the content."

Prices for content-delivery services are based on the number of megabits of bandwidth delivered per month. Akamai is at the high end at $1,995 per 1 Mbps of content delivered per month; Exodus charges $750 per 1 Mbps in the United States and $1,500 in Europe for content delivery. Customers may be subject to one-time installation fees that can run as high as $5,000--but they say providers are offering discounts ranging from 10% to 50% on monthly service as an incentive

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