Content networks give providers a sporting chance

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.

“Whenever you run across IBM [competitively] in a deal, just mention IBM in Atlanta and they lose the business,” said John Watson, vice president of hosting for TWIi Hosting. “The big problem there was not the Internet and not the number of servers; it was the fact that they had all of the servers in one location.”

There was plenty of bandwidth connected to that location; there just wasn’t enough bandwidth between the location and the multiple ISPs that were feeding off of it.

Web hosts learned a valuable lesson from IBM’s Olympics experience:  Don’t put all you eggs--or servers--in one basket. Instead, distribute content across the network.

That’s what TWIi does when it hosts the British Open’s Web site every year, providing up-to-the-minute scores and a running commentary, along with some limited video clips of the golfing action.

While Britons and avid golfers around the world put the Open on the same pedestal as the Olympics, the Web site doesn’t get nearly the same number of hits that IBM took in Atlanta. Nonetheless, without CDNs TWIi probably wouldn’t be able to keep Web browsers happy with timely and immediately delivered information.

Rather than farm the work out to a company that specializes in CDNs, TWIi uses its own caching facility, built with CacheFlow technology, to handle its content distribution needs.

“If you have a lot of events over the course of the year, like we do, it starts becoming a lot more economical to build your own [CDN] because caching devices are relatively cheap now and the bandwidth is relatively cheap,” Watson said. His advice: “Build your own if you have lots of events; if you have only one even a year, you’re better off going to a CDN and having them provide the infrastructure for a period of time.”

But caching is only a part of a CDN, said Mark Kayak, CacheFlow’s marketing manager. “The important pat of an improved quality experience is less how much content you have sitting on that content delivery appliance, but whether or not you have the right content on that content delivery appliance,” he said.

The British Open demands a large infrastructure for a short period of time. If it was TWIi’s only reason for existence, it might be a good idea to use an outside CDN provider. Instead, because TWIi carries hosts such diverse Web activities as concerts and Indian cricket, it’s better off building its own infrastructure to cache and deliver content.

“In this scenario with the British Open,... they ended up deploying these solutions in a number of [points of presence] around the world and we were able to handle this traffic load very effectively,” said Charles Dauber, CacheFlow’s vice president of marketing and management.

Thus, while it wasn’t an Olympian task, TWIi was able to score an ace with golf fans worldwide by delivering a constant stream of British Open information with quicksilver response time.