InformationWeek

March 27, 2000

Catching On To The Advantages Of Caching

By Mitt Jones

mong the types of thin servers making waves in large companies are caching appliances. Simply put, these devices afford much faster Internet response time and reduce bandwidth consumption by storing frequently accessed Web content on-site.

Companies such as CacheFlow, Cisco Systems, and Network Appliance have dominated the caching appliance market. They initially focused on service providers, which typically make liberal use of such servers to provide subscribers fast access to information. But as the idea caught on, major vendors such as Compaq have introduced caching appliances of their own, betting that their enterprise know-how will pay off big. Customers "want a vendor that's going to have a common management framework across their appliances," says John Young, Compaq's VP for TaskSmart Servers. They also want a framework "that plugs back into their standard management tools," he says.

Installing a caching appliance is nearly a plug-and-play operation, says Eric Jorgensen, LAN services team leader for Southwest Airlines Co. "You just give it an IP address and a name and plug it in, and that's it," he says. Jorgensen installed two Compaq TaskSmart C-2000 caching appliances to speed access for 2,500 to 3,000 networked PCs.

Jorgensen says he likes the reporting and optimization features the product provides. "I use reporting software to identify the top 10 to 20 sites for a given week and then schedule the TaskSmart to download those Web sites in their entirety during off-peak hours." This has helped Southwest Airlines achieve remarkable cache hit rates with its caching appliances-from 55% to 65%, he says. "We're actually serving up about 4 Gbytes of data from these boxes a day," he says, decreasing users' need to go to the Net. Partially as a result, the two T1 lines that serve the 3,000 or so PCs are being used less, he says. Adding more communications links "is something we don't have to worry about now, and that's a cost that never goes away," Jorgensen says.

Jorgensen was using a software cache product on a general-purpose server before moving up to the caching appliances. "There were a lot of bugs and other problems such as users' not being able to access some sites," he says. "But the bigger draw of this hardware solution was the easy fault tolerance it allowed." Jorgensen clustered his two TaskSmart servers, so a hot spare takes over seamlessly if the active server goes down.

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