Decades old Internet routing and transport protocols were created for text and are inefficient at handling packets of voice, video, and graphics content, especially at today’s transmission rates. Choked pipes and the rapid increase in traffic further degrade performance. Add to that the risks introduced by network outages due to severed communications links. All this can cause a lot of frustration for customers who are trying to access business services and content over the Internet. At an event titled ‘Edge Distribution and the Trends shaping the Future of the Internet’ organized by Network Computing for Akamai Technologies, Internet specialists revealed some innovative approaches round these challenges.

Speaking at this event, Sanjay Singh, VP & MD Akamai India, said, “With enterprises across the globe there is a need for immediate access to information for entertainment, for the ability to conduct transactions at any given time or location across the globe. On the Internet there are challenges around security, scalability, performance. To address these challenges Akamai developed algorithms and intelligent routing across a distributed platform.”

Some regard Akamai as a content caching company, while others may not have heard about it at all, since it keeps a low profile. But it’s a fact that if you host any type of media on the Internet, it’s likely to also be on one of Akamai’s 56,000 servers. Strategically placed on the edges of the Internet, inside more than 950 networks at 15,000 locations in 71 countries, including India, Akamai’s network of edge servers form a layer on the Internet. This layer acts as the “grease” for moving data at high speeds from source to destination. Apart from that, Akamai’s offering a range of services for application delivery, content delivery, video delivery, virtual desktop delivery, cloud optimization and analytics.

Cloud optimization services
Studies show that by putting its infrastructure on the cloud, enterprises can save costs by as much as 30 percent. But the cloud also poses a set of challenges, some of these being security and response time.
At the event in New Delhi, Dr Tom Leighton, co-founder and chief scientist, Akamai Technologies, illustrated the problems encountered when data is transmitted between the client and the data center in the cloud. He then showed how Akamai’s SureRoute technology solves the problem.

“The problem is that the user has to cross the cloud to get to the data center because it isn’t local anymore and that route may perform poorly, especially over long distances. It encounters high packet loss and latency (in transmission). SureRoute solves this problem because it finds a good route to the Internet and accelerates the transmission by tunneling the traffic through Akamai’s servers at various points,” explained Dr Leighton.

Traditionally, routing data through Internet networks is done by BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). Both were invented 30 years ago and are inefficient at transporting data by today’s standards. Akamai claims SureRoute and its other innovations overcome such inefficiencies. SureRoute also helps in redirecting traffic to alternative routes when communication links, such as submarine cables, are severed.
In an exclusive interview with Network Computing, just before the event, Chris Schoettle, Executive Vice President of Products, Akamai explained these innovations.

“TCP has a number of inefficiencies—it is a “chatty” protocol. There’s a lot of back and forth and a lot of packet loss with TCP. So we created TCP optimization technology. We’ve also provided compression to reduce the packet size. Another example of the http layer is what we call ‘prefetching.’ When an end user is surfing a website we’ll anticipate which links or pages he’ll want next. And all this is part of our Application Acceleration Services,” informed Schoettle.
An innovation that end-users in particular will appreciate is Intelligent Prefetching. When you download a Web page the browser fetches just two objects at a time and that’s why it takes so long for the whole page to arrive.

Explained Dr Leighton, “With intelligent prefetching we fetch the HTML and as we send the HTML to the end user we parse it. Then we look at all the embedded objects. We then know that the browser will eventually fetch those in a few milliseconds. We then get all the objects and cache these on an Akamai edge server, so that they arrive just in time for the user.”

Video delivery and analytics
Akamai has applied prefetching technology to video content and has created the Akamai HD network. Says Schoettle, “The HD network provides the ability to serve video traffic and media content on the Akamai network. We serve the Indian market well with HD and a specific example is the (FIFA) World Cup next June. The World Cup will be on TV but Akamai will provide an HD quality experience that enables people to watch it online using laptops. The HD network will be different compared with what you get with TV. You will have multiple viewing angles and DVR (record, replay) features. You won’t need a separate device to do this. We are talking to all the ISPs here in India to enable this video service on their networks.”

In addition, Akamai develops a set of analytics that report back certain data to customers. This data includes parameters such as how much content is being served, the audience it is being served to, at what time, at what quality, which geographies watch the most, the type of devices used to access it, and the OS on those devices. Based on this data customers can plan their content to suit the audiences accordingly.
Akamai also offers a service called Predictive ADS (Advertising Decision Solutions) through its acquisition of a company named Acerno. This product provides behavioral targeting for advertising services. As of now this service is available in North America only.

Akamai in India
In its ‘Q2 State of the Internet Report’ (www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet), Akamai reveals there are over 3 million unique IP addresses in India, and this number is up 57 percent year-over-year and 8 percent from Q1 2009.

“This indicates that the India market is growing steadily. The India market is a key market for the success of our international operations. We will continue to invest in India to capture the market opportunity and to expand the company’s centre in India,” said Sanjay Singh of Akamai India. “We have evolved with the India market in the last four years and will continue to launch solutions to cater to the changing Internet trends,” he added.

Akamai set up its office in Bengaluru in 2005, the second largest one outside its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its 400 employees here are involved in full-fledged activities like product management, engineering, network operation, deployment, sales, and customer services. What’s more, Akamai’s global analytics products that we earlier described are all developed at the Bengaluru office.
Akamai’s customers in India include Jet Airways, Rediff.com, Hungama.com, Naukri.com, Times of India, Web18, and BharatMatrimony.com, to name a few.