A market ready to cache fire?

Brace yourselves: Web cache vendors see money in the enterprise, and the sales onslaught is about to begin.

Caching speeds data retrieval by serving up frequently accessed Web pages from a dedicated hard drive. While ISPs have been using it for some time, few enterprise managers are buying in - yet.

A recent Dataquest report estimates that the enterprise market for caching is still two to three months away from really taking root. But switch, software and new caching vendors are already vying for a piece of what could become a very lucrative market.

Arrowpoint Communications recently announced plans to ship its new Content Smart Cache Software, which will enable the company's Content Smart Switches to perform Web caching. The upgrade for the CS-100 switch will cost $7,995 and is scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter. An upgrade for the CS-800 will cost $19,995 and ship in the first quarter of next year.

Inktomi recently unveiled Version 2.0 of Traffic Server, which adds some internal improvements that increase Traffic Server's caching speed and algorithms, including the ability to cache RealVideo. Traffic Server, which is a software-only product, also has improved reverse proxy configuration, so it can be used as a front end to a Web server, according to Peter Christy, principal analyst at Collaborative Research in Los Altos, Calif.

Foundry Networks, usually thought of as a gigabit company, is also cashing in on the market. The start-up's ServerIron switch was recently certified by Inktomi to work with Traffic Server. The ServerIron, which is a Layer 2/3/4 switch with eight, 16 or 24 10/100M bit/sec ports and one or two gigabit uplinks, performs transparent Web cache redirection when it sits in front of a Web server loaded with Traffic Server.

In its most basic form, a cache server stores Web pages on its hard drive. When someone selects a URL, that request goes to the cache server first.

Almost all enterprise networks that use caching today are using proxy servers, such as Microsoft's Proxy Server and Netscape's Proxy Server. However, proxy servers have drawbacks in the enterprise. Each client browser has to point to the proxy server's IP address. If the proxy server's IP address is changed, all browsers must be manually configured to the new address.

While proxy servers also provide filtering and access security, they're not optimized for caching, so network administrators have to set expiration and refresh times on the data.

Dedicated caching software and hardware instead use complex algorithms that set "time to live" and refresh instructions based on a number of factors, including how often the content has been updated compared with how long it has existed, and how likely it is to change.

Some people are hesitant to implement caching in the network for fear they'll serve up stale contents from a dynamic World Wide Web. While the Internet often seems completely dynamic and immediate, a new Gartner Group report says caching logs indicate 40% to 60% of user requests can be cached.

However, caching will really take off in the enterprise as client/server-based computing gives way to browser-based applications, Christy says. "In the next year, it'll shift rapidly," he predicts.