Analysis: CACHING Bypassing the Clogged Arteries

The
Internet is growing rapidly. IDC predicts that there will be half billion
Internet users by 2002. While this strengthens the strategies of evolving
e-companies, it also increases the already bursting pressure on the Internet
network to deliver content and services across boundaries. One, the queue of
users waiting for a particular web page at a point of time is getting longer.
Two, the content on the way to the users’ terminal is likely to encounter many
traffic jams on the way.

All these lead to poor response time in
terms of page/file downloads and also loss of packets leading to failure in
downloads. According to Zona Research of the US, companies lose more than $4
billion in revenues annually due to slow or unavailable web sites. The average
e-customer will wait no more than 8 seconds for a site to get downloaded.
Repetitive poor response may even lead to the customer blacklisting the site.

Slow Indian Sites

In India, there are limited domestic
hosting facilities and the cost of doing so is prohibitively high due to
expensive bandwidth. Hence, most Indian sites are hosted in the US, which is
fine for NRIs players. But with the Internet user base in India likely to cross
30 million by 2004, the need for an Indian strategy is being strongly felt.
Unfortunately, the present Internet infrastructure in India is not encouraging.
Indian ISPs are yet to establish peering points to exchange traffic
domestically. Also, the lack of a national backbone may not substantially
improve the response time of web sites even if they are served locally. Until
there is a conducive hosting environment in India, companies would continue to
have their content in the US.

According to tests done by vendors,
some of the busier Indian sites reported response time much beyond the danger
zone of 8 seconds. Though better performance of computers and major attempts to
ease the last mile communication links may make things better, the middle mile
which constitutes the large Internet cloud may worsen in terms of performance as
more Internet users log in. The Internet traffic is as fast as the weakest link
that it traverses through.

Caching: The Basic Solution

Web objects such as banner ads,
graphics, and Java applets constitute about 70 percent of a typical web page, in
terms of overall bytes. The HTML texts form the remaining 30 percent. By having
caching servers store these embedded objects in a location closer to the user,
considerable improvement can be made in response time and optimum usage of
bandwidth. The need for caching grows with the extent of presence of graphical
and streaming content.

Traffic Management: A Step Ahead

A typical Indian company might go in
for another origin server in India mirroring the content stored in the US server
that can be used as a backup server. Also, this could help in speeding up
response time. As in a probable case, use the

US-based server during the daytime in India as America sleeps and use the Indian
server during the night when the American server may be busy tendering to NRI
clicks. A load balancer or traffic management product of companies like F5 and
Alteon can route a request to the right origin server taking into account data
center and network conditions such as round trip time, number of active servers,
packet loss, and so forth.

Outsourcing: The Way to Go

However, taking on the task of
installing cache servers in multi-locations and maintaining them might be
expensive, especially when the users are geographically dispersed. Traffic
management products are not only complicated but they tend to be costly too.
Also, a company would like to concentrate on its core competencies. It is here
that Internet content delivery services become relevant. Companies like Speedera
Networks, Akamai Technologies, and Digital Island provide these services through
a network of cache sites across the globe. These networks have an intelligent
Network Operating Centre (NOC) which monitors the health of the Internet and
runs typical algorithmic calculation to pinpoint which caching server is the
closest to a particular user. This apart, companies like Speedera provide global
load balancing/traffic management between multiple origin servers.

Nareshchandra
Laishram