The content-delivery network market
defies easy explanation, but one thing’s for certain—Web
site performance gains are in the offing.
By Cassimir Medford
Network World, 09/11/00
No doubt you've heard the buzz on content delivery; the concept practically exploded into mainstream consciousness about a year ago with Akamai Technologies' ultrasuccessful IPO, which may go down as the last of the great high-tech coming-out parties.
Keeping tabs on content deliverers
Content-delivery companies such as Akamai and Adero are being talked up for good reason. They address the most universally asked question of the Internet, verbalized by everyone from Web surfers in Dubai to CEOs in New York: How can I speed the Web's performance?
Billions of dollars and countless units of brainpower have been spent trying to find the answer. Venture capital firms sank $120 million in Akamai during its early days, and then the company raised $234 million - one-third more than expected - in its October 1999 IPO. Within six months, the stakes were noticeably higher. In March, Cisco shelled out $800 million in stock to acquire SightPath, which makes content-delivery appliances.
Other industry players vying for a berth in this market include traditional carriers such as AT&T; Web hosting firms such as Digital Island and Exodus Communications; and start-up specialists such as Adero - perhaps the most direct competitor to Akamai.
Free flowing
Content-delivery network providers defy easy classification. They are one part data networking and two parts telecom carrier. Add a cup of hardware and a liberal helping of mathematics. Set in a service mold or serve as a software product. And voilá, you have an emerging class of companies that is generating buzz galore.
Having gone from a standing start to full speed in about six months, Akamai is the assumed market leader. It has the most announced customers and presumably the most market share, says John Katsaros, vice president of Jupiter Communications, a technology analysis firm in New York.
Akamai launched its FreeFlow content-delivery network service in April 1999, then went public six months later. On its first day as a public company, Akamai's shares rose 450% over its offering price of $26. The stock climbed to $166, then settled in at $145.19.
The deal raised $234 million for the company, an increase of 33% from its initial filing for $176 million. At press time, Akamai stock was down, at $76, but still well above its initial asking price.
One of the reasons for Akamai's stellar performance and the push by others into this market is that content delivery's value has obvious appeal to dot-coms and traditional companies engaged in e-commerce. If a site doesn't perform well, its bottom line suffers. A content-delivery network can guarantee performance levels (and provide peace of mind to site operators).
"What [a content-delivery network provider] offers and what we needed was an immediate match. Our objective was to speed the download time of our pages and give our users a better experience," says Rich Caccappolo, chief technology officer (CTO) and senior vice president for iVillage.com, a site devoted to women's lifestyles.
IVillage.com evaluated the main content delivery network providers, then settled on Akamai's FreeFlow service, Caccappolo says. In the six or so months that iVillage.com has been using FreeFlow, pages have been loading 30% to 80% faster than they did in the pre-Akamai days, he says.
BET.com, an entertainment and lifestyle portal for African-Americans, has witnessed a speed increase, too, says Craig Maccubbin, CTO for the site.
"We felt like we were putting a stake in the ground for African-Americans online, but we underestimated the site's potential popularity," Maccubbin says. "We launched with two-and-a-half times the traffic that we architected for, with pages that were four times fatter than we originally intended."
The site was facing a crisis. "I had to make an emergency call to [Akamai] on a Tuesday afternoon at 3. It got us up and running in two hours," Maccubbin says.
Maccubbin and his team had done some research on content-delivery companies from a "we will eventually get there" perspective, prior to going live with BET.com. "But once we launched, our traffic just went up and up and up. That's when content distribution went from the speculative to the real," he says.
BET.com has become the seminal African-American Web site. Akamai's FreeFlow has it running 10 times faster than when it launched, Maccubbin says.
Content-delivery networks encompass all the current Internet performance-boosting methodologies: caching, replicated server hardware, agent software, network design and carrier services. Content-delivery network providers create shortcuts between the source of the information and the person requesting it.
Content on the quick
Under typical circumstances, a request from a user in New York for information that resides on a server in San Jose fights its way across the country, making multiple hops through the congested Internet. That naturally takes time and slows performance.
With a content-delivery network, that same request is plucked from the congested Internet and placed on a high-bandwidth, pay-for-play, low-latency private network that has been fine-tuned to the needs of corporate customers. It is rerouted to a nearby content server, most likely a machine in New York that can deliver up-to-date cached data.
Specifics vary from provider to provider, but the result is essentially the same. For instance, Cisco's hardware-based approach the, Content Delivery Network system, will distribute content out to edge nodes and redirect requests to a local node. Cisco will place control in your hands via a content-delivery appliance that will sit inside the corporate firewall, essentially acting as an end node, and a central-site box that will include upwards of 15G bytes of media storage. Cisco comes by its content-delivery technologies via its acquisitions of SightPath in March and ArrowPoint Communications in May. SightPath made network appliances that collect data on Web traffic, congestion and server load; ArrowPoint developed Web switches.
When evaluating content-delivery services, such as Akamai's FreeFlow, Adero's GlobalWise or AT&T's planned Intelligent Content Distribution Service, find out whether a company primarily uses in-house-developed technology and is building its own server network or is piecing together that network. While Akamai and Adero fall in the former category, another big contender - Exodus - fits in the latter.
Exodus, in Santa Clara, supplies the infrastructure, which is its core business. It partners for everything else - with Inktomi for caching; Mirror Image Internet for content delivery services; Veritas for backup; Sun for servers; Foundry Networks for Gigabit Ethernet switching; and Computer Associates for systems management. It also acquired Service Metrics, an Internet monitoring company, and KeyLabs, an e-business testing company - both of which supply the measurement pieces of its network.
Cost, of course, is also a factor. If you choose a specialist like Adero or Akamai, you'll pay about $2,000 per 1M bit/sec of content served. "People commit to a certain bandwidth per month, and we charge them a monthly recurring fee. We use the 95th percentile, in which case we monitor performance over a month and then we chop off the top 5% and bill against that," says Andrew Lickly, product manager at Akamai, in Cambridge, Mass. "The odd bursts are chopped off. That's pretty much industry standard."
BET.com pays about $10,000 per month for the Akamai service and expects the bill to go up when it expands internationally.
"We don't mind," Maccubbin says. "Akamai has postponed the need to bring up another data center right now. The savings from that is $1.5 million, in the cost of routers, firewalls, switches, etc. I can take that $1.5 million nut and push it out, which is ultraimportant for a company that wants to go public."
If you go with ReadyCache Content Distribution Service from Exodus, you'll pay a one-time installation fee of $5,500 for the first region (West Coast, Central, East Coast or Europe) and $2,750 for each additional region. You'll also pay a premium based on bandwidth delivered by the ReadyCache service. The caching premium cost in the United States is $825 per megabit/sec, monthly.
Prices for Cisco's products vary widely. At the high end, the Content Distribution Manager 4650, a provisioning and management appliance for a single content provider or enterprise content-delivery network, costs $94,995. Cisco also has content routers, engines and switches.
Web watching
But how do you verify that your content-distribution network is performing? For Adero customer Earthwatch, an international nonprofit organization that promotes conservation through partnerships among scientists and the public, the proof is in the pudding.
"For a nonprofit, this was like gold dust. In the old days, we worked at 1% return if we were lucky," says Blue Magruder, Earthwatch's director of public affairs. "We've gone from 46 seconds to load a page to 2.6 seconds. This revolutionizes the way people use our site. In the past, our volunteers had to really love us to wait for the information."
Magruder gets her statistics from Keynote, an independent monitoring service.
Tracking performance is easy compared to tracking performers. Consolidation should continue amid the arrival of new entrants. Besides the Cisco acquisitions, Digital Island already has grabbed Sandpiper Networks and Exodus has taken a stake in Mirror Image.
"You will see more companies partnering or acquiring or being acquired. Anyone with anything that looks like a content-distribution solution will have a target on its back," says Nitsan Hargil, senior Internet analyst with Kaufman Bros., L.P., in New York.
Companies that can claw their way into key market positions will surely do well. "These companies are alleviating the inefficiencies of the Internet, and they should benefit handsomely," says David Levy, senior research analyst for Chase H&Q in San Francisco. "We are bullish on them."
Medford is a networking writer.
