RE: [kNT] akamai

["John McHugh" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick,
That's probably the best explanation I've heard out side of Akamai! I have
worked with Jonathan Seileg SVP and (the late, as he was on the first plane
to strike on the 11th) Danny Lewin CTO and what you outline there is almost
true to the general running of their network. They would argue furiously
that they don't need a minimum of nine servers in a rack for usable
connectivity and that one in every ISP would work (in their dreams). True
they have many thousands of servers located around the globes network but as
George Conrades (CEO)plays golf with the head honcho's at Yahoo and CNN the
caching gets flushed every so many minutes which really only helps those
content serving customers that have volumetric traffic. They have terrible
problems sometimes resolving issues with embedded files, or there's some
complicated Flash stuff going, but for images, audio and video it works,
especially Playboy as I have watched, although you won't find any of the
Akamai site championing this as it has far more to do with Hugh's CEO (who
happens to be a girlie q'suprise and also has Hefner as a surname) being a
shareholder in Akamai.

There are so many other people doing it now though and some have a slightly
more defined/refined purpose.

AN EXAMPLE ONLY
http://www.pelagonetworks.com/homepage_fla.html
http://www.mirror-image.com/index.html

Mirror Image as one, for example takes the philosophy that if you build big
server rooms full of toys and call them CAP's (Content Access Points), the
user can define where, how much and for how long their content stays in this
CAP and it has a nifty little tool that allows you to ROS (Return To Origin
Server) when the content hasn't been cashed in the CAP's and then it
automatically sticks it into the user determined sites. They have about 30
of these CAP's around the world......... very expensive start-up! Do a
search and you'll see the rest. It's becoming a very competitive market now
and the name of the game is price slash. It's never been cheaper to edge
cache!

In terms of delivery I can't outline the Servecast network but it's a mile
above everyone else's due to the way the CTO built it. I think we should all
be looking for a peering solution and then we wouldn't need any of these
expensive options to steam content.

Still hope I wasn't being too cynical and I hope my comments don't offend
anyone, but I believe honesty is the best policy.
Regards
John