[thelist] Server presence in China

William Adamsen williamadamsen at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 16 09:05:01 CST 2003


While I don't have any experience with China I do have
some with "distributed providers" or Content Access
Points (CAPs) such as Akamai or Mirror Image.  Their
consideration and use should be part of any
availability planning much as a proxy server, load
balancer or server accelerator is with an intranet.

For simple differentiation purposes, Akamai's
strengths are in delivering distributed applications -
dbs and services - and in getting the content closest
to the customer by relying on available servers at
smaller ISPs.  Mirror Image (MI) excels at fast
content migration and dns management via their large
and selective locations.  Both offer fully automated
functionality which is quite effective once the rules
have been fleshed out.  My take is that MI can capture
and deploy changed content faster and more reliably,
while Akamai gets it to the customer a little faster.
I recommend doing your own evaluations.

And using services such as Keynote or Service Metrics
you can do just that - monitor your current
performance from the areas you'd like to target - and
develop metrics for those locations over time.  You'll
find incredible variations in Asia both over time and
geographically ... I suspect this is at least in part
because of telecom peering networks that just don't
work well.  I digress - to test the solution most CAPs
will offer a spoof to determine their effectiveness
for at least one page of your content.  Results are
impressive almost without exception both at home and
abroad!

While I think CAPs offer big bang for the buck - the
big decision factors will depend on what kind of site
you have and just how important is control over your
content.  For instance - does a press release need to
be delivered guaranteed "worldwide" within some short
time period?  Is the content all static .. both images
and html or are most pages dynamic?  Theoretically, a
site could be run entirely from a CAP if it was all
static content.  While dynamic sites have less
opportunities for easy gains and less selection of
CAPs that can provide all the services.  While you'll
need some rewrite of the site it can be made virtually
painless - and certainly worth the effort.  Depending
on the extent of content delivered you'll almost
certainly need to consider alternative metrics for
page views and user traffic for obvious reasons.

One aspect I haven't mentioned but is probably
apparent is the ability to reduce your server loads by
offloading delivery of static stuff.  You may find a
drastically reduced loading on your servers that could
effectively put off anticipated capital investments
and even allow you to reduce bandwidth - that should
please your boss!

In any event, CAPs should be part of any availabiltiy
planning much as global DNS, load balancing,  custom
error handling and all the rest of the stuff you do to
make your site as available as promised.

Sorry I can't really help you about China.

   - Bill




--- Moe Rubenzahl <MoeRubenzahl at forpaws.org> wrote:
> I work for a medium-sized manufacturing company with
> a
> business-to-business website. We have a small shared
> server in
> mainland China and plan to upgrade it to a more
> substantial dynamic
> site.
>
> The rest of the world is served by our servers in
> Northern California
> (co-lo). I have been told that mainland China is
> different -- because
> of bandwidth issues in and out of the country and
> government control
> issues, a server inside China is essential. That
> government workers
> and many companies cannot access Internet sources
> outside their
> borders. But another source tells me this is not
> true.
>
> My questions:
>
> 1. Is this true or can I serve China well from my
> US-based server
> (which has plenty of bandwidth)?
>
> 2. While I am rasing this question, how about the
> rest of the world?
> Should I be looking at a distributed provider, like
> Akamai?
>
> 3. Any suggestions for how I can measure my
> performance worldwide?
> Keynote? Mercury Interactive? Or is that overkill
> for this.
>
> Thanks in advance....
>
> Moe
>
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=====
William Adamsen
5 Dock Road
South Norwalk, CT  06854
203.866.2244(h)
203.952.7740(m)

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