Akamai accelerating Web-based apps

Akamai Technologies this week is expected to launch a service that promises to improve the performance of Web-based applications for business customers.

The content delivery network (CDN) service provider intends to announce its Application Accelerator Service. The service is designed to improve the availability of Web applications, as well as make it easier to geographically disperse these applications around the world.

Akamai and its CDN competitors have focused on offering Web site caching to improve performance. This new service lets users speed up internal Web-based applications that might be stored on servers behind a user's firewall.

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Akamai Technologies this week is expected to launch a service that promises to improve the performance of Web-based applications for business customers.

The content delivery network (CDN) service provider intends to announce its Application Accelerator Service. The service is designed to improve the availability of Web applications, as well as make it easier to geographically disperse these applications around the world.

Akamai and its CDN competitors have focused on offering Web site caching to improve performance. This new service lets users speed up internal Web-based applications that might be stored on servers behind a user's firewall.

"More users are moving applications online to reduce costs and increase efficiencies," says Dave Belson, product manager for application performance services at Akamai.

But when these Web-based applications are distributed globally, they sometimes perform poorly because they are managed and stored locally. For example, a company in the U.S. that houses its Web servers hosted in one data center might see poor application performance for users in Asia.

Businesses that have high-performing Web applications have been forced to manage network problems that affect performance on their own, says Dana Gardner, a senior analyst The Yankee Group. These companies had to deploy, manage and maintain those applications over time, which can be costly. "We haven't seen the same approach that Akamai is taking, where they are offering it as a managed service," Gardner says.

Akamai's new service will improve the overall performance of applications, such as reducing download times and the time it takes to process online transactions, Belson says.

The service provider says it has deployed two new technologies that are key in supporting the new offering. The technologies are end-to-end route optimization and connection optimization.

The end-to-end route optimization tool identifies the best path from the customer edge to Akamai's servers. "The system is constantly testing alternative paths looking for faster and more reliable default paths," Belson says. "It's like taking side roads to get to work rather than the highway." While the side roads total more miles, there could be delays on the highway that make the longer route a better option, he says.

Four tools fall under the connection optimization banner: content pre-fetching, transport protocol optimization, compression and persistent connections.

Yankee's Gardner says many users are opposed to caching their business applications because they are concerned about out-dated corporate information being cached on servers around the Internet.

Content pre-fetching allows Akamai to capture data for a short period of time to improve application performance for end users, while adhering to customer's no-caching rules. With the tool Akamai can capture graphics and scripts from an Application Accelerator Service customer's site as a user logs on to its Web site. The information is stored in a "special area of memory to fulfill one user's request, and then that information is flushed out of memory," Belson says.