Akamai Broadens Reach, Sweetens Pot for ISP Partners

New partnerships with technology, network, and content providers supercharge Akamai's basic value proposition. Free, satellite-based Usenet feed and other goodies lure ISP customers.

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [June 7, 2000]

Content delivery network provider Akamai had a busy month of May. Amid a flurry of partnership announcements, Akamai took steps to increase its terrestrial network reach, add satellite content delivery, leverage third-party load balancers, and sweeten the deal used to lure ISPs into joining Akamai's Accelerated Network Partner (AANP) program.

Speeding Rich Content Delivery
Akamai is perhaps the best known player in the emerging content delivery network market. Through partnership with top-tier network providers like Digex, Genuity, and PSINet, Akamai has created a diverse, fault-tolerant, multi-carrier backbone. At last count, Akamai had knitted together 160 networks in 45 countries using FreeFlow edge servers to ensure fast, reliable content delivery, even under adverse conditions.

FreeFlow applies caching technology to distribute rich content throughout its network, speeding delivery of the graphics, banner ads, and applets responsible for much of the "world wide wait." New Akamai services add support for streaming media and webcasts. An MIT-designed routing algorithm continuously monitors performance and dynamically directs requests to the optimal Akamai server located closest to the user. But simple caching can interfere with origin-server processing like hit counting, cookies, and personalized content generation. With FreeFlow, the origin server remains in the loop; only customer-selected embedded objects are retrieved from Akamai servers.

Over 4000 customer-owned web sites have been "Akamaized" to date. Customers run a "FreeFlow Launcher" utility to convert URLs into ARLs—the 'Akamai Resource Locators' used to route requests to the nearest, fastest server in Akamai's network.

Dynamic "Akamaization" with F5 Networks' BIG-IP
In mid-May, Akamai and F5 Networks announced they would jointly develop a dynamic 'Akamaizer' that converts URLs to ARLs on the fly. According to Dan Matte, Director of Product Management at F5, dynamic Akamaization will be delivered in two ways: as a feature included in the Enterprise version of BIG/ip® Controller at no additional cost, and as part of F5's Special Purpose Appliance Family of products priced under $10K. Both are expected to be available in Q3 2000.

BIG/ip® Controller load-balances traffic to optimize speed and availability across servers at a single location. Today, BIG/ip can be combined with F5's 3-DNS system for geographic load balancing across locations. Dynamic Akamaization will offer F5 customers another avenue for geographic load balancing—one that leverages Akamai's content delivery network. "The combination of the two, F5's BIG/ip product and Akamai's distributed edge services, enables simple press-of-the-button Akamaization to F5's 1600+ and Akamai's 1000+ customers," says Peter Danzig, Akamai VP of Technology.

According to Matte, the agreement between F5 and Akamai is not exclusive. "We could extend similar launching capabilities to other content delivery networks in the future, with a separate appliance or on the same device." Given Akamai's partnership with several cache vendors—Cisco, CacheFlow, InfoLibria, Network Appliance, and Novell—one might reasonably expect to see further partnerships between Akamai and other load balancing vendors.

Go to page 2: Expanding Network Reach With C&W, Cidera