Am 05. Oct, 2000 schwäzte Marc Chung so:

> Actually, it's to save bandwidth.  I recently attended a seminar where
> Akamai gave a talk about their company.  Basically they have nodes at a
> large number of backbones (UUNet, Universities, etc.).  These nodes
> provide bandwith for Akamazied sites, where the users (of Akamaized sites)
> are then redirected to the closest node, essentially load balancing the
> site.

Akamai is a new company doing "edge-caching". It's kinda like having big
transparent proxies running for ISPs, so much of the data is cached
locally and it's cheaper for ISPs to pick it up from the local cache on
the Akamai server than from the real host. I'm probably not completely
explaining it well.

If you're interested in such stuff also look at Axient (a local startup).
I think Axient has a better chance since they're focusing on streaming
media and other bandwidth hogs.

Akamai's got a cool model. As more places change to dynamic content models
I think it'll break down, but I haven't studied that or Akamai well enough
to make an informed decision.

Doesn't matter. On Nov 1 a local company will be launching a new service
and edge-caching won't be needed anymore ;-).

Actually, the two models together might be exactly what the Internet
backbone needs, especially for the streaming media stuff. The two models
will probably feed each other quite well.

Gee, I wonder who that local company might be. ;-)

ciao,

der.hans
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