TV stations dial in app service

Internet Broadcasting Systems, which operates Web sites for television news stations around the country, has used Akamai Technologies' content delivery network for years to speed the delivery of static and dynamic content and to reduce the load on its origin servers. It also has pushed out streaming video and video on demand to the CDN.

"Things were working well," says Dave Abbott, CTO at IBS in Minneapolis. "But then I was taking a look and realizing, 'Man, the most expensive thing for me to build out is anything that touches my database because Oracle is so darn expensive.' "

So Abbott turned to Akamai again for a solution. Today, IBS is one of the first to use a new service Akamai rolled out in partnership with IBM earlier this year. Called EdgeComputing Powered by WebSphere, the service is Akamai's first foray into delivering true application processing power at the Internet's edge.

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Internet Broadcasting Systems, which operates Web sites for television news stations around the country, has used Akamai Technologies' content delivery network for years to speed the delivery of static and dynamic content and to reduce the load on its origin servers. It also has pushed out streaming video and video on demand to the CDN.

"Things were working well," says Dave Abbott, CTO at IBS in Minneapolis. "But then I was taking a look and realizing, 'Man, the most expensive thing for me to build out is anything that touches my database because Oracle is so darn expensive.' "

So Abbott turned to Akamai again for a solution. Today, IBS is one of the first to use a new service Akamai rolled out in partnership with IBM earlier this year. Called EdgeComputing Powered by WebSphere, the service is Akamai's first foray into delivering true application processing power at the Internet's edge.

Other CDNs are moving into application delivery. Mirror Image, for example, can handle Java application processing in its network of content access points. But the alliance with IBM gives Akamai's service a twist because it extends the WebSphere environment out to the edge of the Internet, Akamai executives say.

The service is built on Akamai's overlay network of more than 15,000 edge servers in more than 1,000 networks and in more than 60 countries. Akamai has integrated WebSphere application servers within the Akamai network to support the execution of Java Server Pages, Java servlets and JavaBeans at the edge of the Internet.

As a result, Akamai and IBM executives say, companies don't have to spend time and money on provisioning extra hardware to handle spikes in demand. With EdgeComputing Powered by WebSphere, customers have access to a WebSphere environment on demand, meaning they have the infrastructure they need when they need it and only pay for what they use, the companies say. The service is available from Akamai and IBM Global Services and is priced based on how many application requests the Akamai network handles.

In addition to getting the WebSphere environment on demand, customers also get the benefit of the Akamai network that was designed to deliver content to end users as quickly as possible.

Abbott says that's just what he was looking for as he dealt with Web site traffic that was increasing about 10% every month. The 66 sites he handles also were becoming increasingly interactive with features such as polls, games and quizzes - and the demands on those applications spike when big news breaks.

"TV traditionally has been one of those things you can't talk back to. With a Web site for a television station, all of a sudden this is the first avenue people have to talk back to their TVs and, my God, they talk back to their TVs," Abbott says. "A lot of the polls we do are just fluff, but other things are more pertinent to hard news. In those cases we'll get some pretty big flash crowds."

As the polls became more popular, it was resulting in a drain on IBS' back-end infrastructure, Abbott says. He was using ColdFusion running on an array of Dell servers back-ended by an Oracle database.