[thelist] Akamai

Jason Cartwright mail at jasoncartwright.com
Sun Jul 14 15:42:00 CDT 2002


Akamai are a company with a distributed network of 16,000 web and
streaming servers (when I used them) around the internet. They place
their servers at the 'edge' of the internet - eg at dial up points or
broadband gateways so they are nice and close to the endusers.

Their domains (or their customer's) point to these servers and via some
nifty patented algorithms (computer programs) that work out which server
is closest to you. The content is then delivered from the closest (or
least loaded) server. This has several effects -

* Its transfered faster
* It doesn't ever go down

They also have ESI (edge side include) technology whereby only dynamic
parts of a webpage (eg a banner counter) are taken off your server and
the rest is delivered from the network.

Other people are doing these 'content delivery networks' (CDN) as well -
Digital Island (a division of C&W) is the second biggest I believe.
Sandpiper and Edgix are others.

CDN's proved their worth on 9/11 with news sites being overloaded -
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0924carrier.html

Jason
www.jasoncartwright.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Cheryl Amato
> Sent: 14 July 2002 20:15
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: [thelist] Akamai
>
>
> I was reading an article the other day that mentioned Akamai
> content delivery network & it's ability to ensure that files
> are delivered during peak traffic hours - can someone please
> explain what Akamai is? - I've seen it mentioned before &
> have noticed image path names with it included on various web sites
>
> tia
> Cheryl




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