Island in the bitstream

Tim Wilson, marketing vice president for Digital Island, likes to compare the Internet to the U.S. Postal Service. It grew quickly from local initiatives, and it's good at transporting simple communications. But commerce became more global and time-sensitive, and specialists such as Federal Express emerged.

To Wilson, today's business pace is working the same transformation on the Internet, making it an inefficient way for large multinationals to communicate.

"We're the FedEx of the Internet," Wilson said of his company, which uses its own private high-speed network to host Web content and deliver applications to 17 countries. "We started out competing on speed. Now we've gravitated to an environment in which we can deliver a range of information about a packet and its delivery. We won't sell you software, but we will design an architecture that will enable that transaction to get done more consistently, reliably and quickly."

Digital Island runs four data centers in London, New York, Silicon Valley and its original headquarters of Honolulu. (The company recently relocated its head office to San Francisco.) Honolulu gave rise to the enterprise in 1995: Big Pacific undersea cables land there, by requirement of the National Science Foundation, and the city is positioned to have direct access to international circuits and the Asian customer base.

"Most networks evolved out of a mesh architecture," Wilson said. "With no base network to begin with, Digital Island went through a green-field start and designed a network architecture that could predict how a packet will travel through it."

Public peering is good for quick connectivity, but it's not conducive to the elevated performance standards required by companies doing lots of e-commerce worldwide. "A bunch of providers share a common LAN and say, 'I'll take your traffic and you take mine,'" said Allan Leinwand, Digital Island's vice president of engineering. "But those contracts typically have no quality of service, no throughput guarantees-and bluntly, if you're peering with a competitor and they make you mad, you can cut them off."

Instead, Digital Island goes to a backbone provider in each country it serves and contracts with them to carry its traffic, then uses that bandwidth to carry only data from Digital Island clients. "From every one of our private peering points, we're a dead end," Leinwand said. "Australia doesn't see Singapore or France. They only see Digital Island at the end of their circuits."

The result is a high degree of control over latency and other performance standards that allows Digital Island to offer enhanced options beyond simple or open bandwidth. Reserved bandwidth allows customers to set a throughput floor for their transmissions. The managed bandwidth option allows them to allocate that reserved throughput dynamically to any country.

Digital Island's business model is usage-based; companies pay only for the time their data is on the network and for the distance it travels. That's done through metering software running on the company's routers, which allows Digital Island to offer customers Web-based reporting on their transmissions-updated every three hours and segregated by destination.

Such reporting is about to become even finer-grained, now that Digital Island has begun rolling local content managers into the points of presence of the countries it serves. These will monitor traffic from the data centers to the in-country backbone points. Using software from Inktomi and Webspective, they will also allow Digital Island to cache frequently accessed content and mirror content that will be downloaded many times with no changes. "We take content that is relatively static and store it at the fringes of the network," Wilson said. "Since it's like you put your own server in Germany, we'll give you the rate for connecting locally instead of using expensive private lines."

The company has recently received a big infusion of investment capital from venture capitalists and plans to use it to develop new value-added technologies. But while Digital Island has not discounted adding to its stable of data centers, the company is philosophically opposed to deploying large numbers of them.

"Our motto is, take data once and use the network to distribute it," Leinwand said.

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