A NETWORK OF SEISMIC PROPORTIONS

For a typical company, maintaining readily available information on a Web site is routine. It posts the content on the site, updates it regularly and allows users to access it. In peak times, the site sometimes gets congested — and that's worrisome — but it's hardly an earth-shaking occurrence and generally is only a short-term problem.

Peak times for the U.S. Geologic Survey, however, are earth-shaking occurrences. The government agency monitors and issues timely reports on global seismic activity, and when the earth moves, so does the traffic meter on its Web site as people log in to learn what's going on.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE Content networks give providers a sporting chance Nov 12, 2001, 01:06 p.m. ET, TelephonyOnline.com It's quite possible that content delivery networks were born during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. That’s when IBM’s noble Web experiment that focused on covering the Games fizzled when too many people sought too much information in too short of a time frame. more

The USGS Web site dispenses information about earthquakes around the world, delivering up-to-the-minute seismic details. Thus, when a big one hits — or even a little one — the site can't slow down. Minutes, even seconds, are precious for those whose world is crumbling. That's why when Akamai Technologies came forth with a distributed network plan that would place the USGS information on myriad remote servers with the intelligence to handle traffic flows, the movers and shakers at USGS took notice.

“We were constantly trying to chase the curve where we thought we knew what the demand was going to be and build out for that demand,” said Jill McCarthy, associate coordinator for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program. The problem was that, with the Internet's increasing popularity, by the time the USGS had devised a new traffic model, the next larger earthquake — which generated still more hits — blew the model off the road. The USGS discovered it hadn't anticipated the demand after all, McCarthy said.

The USGS had tried to anticipate user demand by building an infrastructure for what McCarthy described as the “100-year flood.” In this case, though, that flood would consist of Web users, not water. Meeting this demand forced the USGS to pack a ton of resources and funding into something that it might only need once — for only a limited time.

Akamai suggested a network technology that went beyond a typical content distribution/delivery network to intelligently distribute USGS Web content and make it readily available. By having thousands of remote content sites, the USGS could easily handle normal daily inquiries while being prepared for worst-case-scenario demand spikes. The agency liked the concept.

“We have a distributed architecture, distributed information, distributed application and processing,” said Signe Furlong, Akamai's product marketing manager. “We're sort of a bigger set than just a [content delivery/distribution network]. We see it as outsourced infrastructure.”

There are 13,000 servers available to the USGS. These distribution points go beyond just caching and updating content; they intelligently determine traffic flows to optimize performance by rerouting information during peak usage times.

“There's some sophistication in [Akamai's] algorithms. They get the information to the requester the most efficient way possible,” McCarthy said. USGS site response time has been cut at least in half for day-to-day usage, she said. Though she doesn't know what will happen when the big one hits, the setup “seems to be working great.”

By allowing Akamai to concentrate on network readiness, the USGS has been able to reallocate resources to other areas. That is an additional benefit of content delivery networks that many customers want in times of economic and personal insecurity, Furlong said. Akamai's customers in particular “want to start focusing more on their core competencies,” he said. “It's expensive to maintain infrastructure.”

Whether outsourced or maintained in-house, there's also a growing awareness of the value of distributed content as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. On that date, cell phone and wireless networks were overloaded. And while the Internet fared well, some news sites were overwhelmed, said Ari Newman, director of network operations for Volera, a content networking solutions provider. “A well-designed [content delivery network] that has content distribution and management built into it could have allowed those sites to scale without any degradation of service.”

But disasters both natural and unnatural do not totally obscure the main reason for content delivery networks.

“Users just want better quality experiences,” said Mark Kraynak, corporate marketing manager for CacheFlow, a content networking company. “From a network operations perspective, they want to meet that expectation, but they want to do it in a way that gives them efficiencies and control of that content.”

Thus, when Web content providers want to deliver up-to-date information — whether about earthquakes or the stock market — they look to content delivery networks.

“It allows us to give our customers some security, some potential disaster recovery,” Furlong said. “They are able to always communicate with their customers, their partners and the public.”

Even in the event of an earth-shaking experience.