Multiple vision Duplicate 'mirrored' Web sites could help ease demand for network resources

A new object-oriented approach to improving the reliability and accessibility of World Wide Web sites could eventually help carriers avoid network congestion.

Under a recently announced agreement, Versant Object Technology's Web Propagation Framework and Genuity Inc.'s Reflector product will be merged, resulting in a system that uses an object-oriented database to replicate, or mirror, busy Web sites. The Genuity Reflector then directs user queries to the Web site that is closest to the user or to the site that has the greatest available capacity at a given time, minimizing congestion and improving network performance.

"No matter how you optimize the disks of your Web site, or what kind of a sophisticated strategy you use for the servers, the traffic is all using a single pipe to get there," said Robert Freeman, marketing director at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Versant. "There's still a T-1 or T-3 line that's handling all these calls. For things like Internet commerce to work, it's going to be crucial that we engineer some intelligence into the network to prevent bottlenecks.

The combined Versant/Genuity product automatically creates duplicate sites as traffic dictates, enabling users to see identical content without having to fight for bandwidth on the network. The framework permits the content on these mirrored sites to be updated simultaneously, guaranteeing that users have a consistent view of the site regardless of which version they actually access.

While the technology is likely to "be of much more use to[Internet service providers] than to carriers in the near future," this distributed approach to Web traffic could also help ease overtaxed parts of the telephone network, said Joshua Duhl, an analyst at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm.

"If people can get their information locally from the site that's nearest to them, you can avoid the traffic jams," Duhl said. "The way the Internet works now is [similar to having] one supermarket where everyone goes, and the aisles tend to get pretty crowded. Mirroring the sites is like opening a bunch of convenience stores across town-the same amount of traffic will exist, but it will be distributed and much easier to handle." Carriers that also act as ISPs could use a similar system combined with knowledge of their customer base to avoid bottlenecks and improve network performance, Duhl said.

The impetus for the technology's development is Internet commerce, which will demand high availability and a consistent image for end users. Genuity hopes the technology will provide its high-speed backbone customers with the ability to conduct high-volume business on the Internet starting this year.

"For electronic commerce to be truly realized, the Internet must evolve to enable the transaction of business with instantaneous and reliable responses," said T. Geir Ramleth, president and chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Genuity. To attract and keep new customers, "it will be necessary for Internet users to have the same comfort level with regard to reliability and security that the telephone provides today.

The framework could also come in handy if the "friendly relationship" between carriers regarding billing for the data traffic routing starts to erode, said Freeman. Several carriers are looking into the technology, according to Freeman, although he could not specify which ones.

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