IT Jumps Aboard Cache Bandwagon

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November 05, 1999 (8:35 AM EST)

By Christine Zimmerman,

If a slew of new products, joint ventures, and investor euphoria are any indication, caching is poised to come on strong in the enterprise.

Cisco this week detailed a content networking strategy built around software and a new caching engine.

Meantime, Dell, Edgix, Inktomi, Novell, and Sun used the ISPCon show in San Jose, Calif., this week to spell out their caching strategies.

To date, caching has largely been the province of ISPs. But enterprise IT managers are increasingly warming to its benefits.

Merrill Lynch recently implemented caching for 10,000 internal users. As much as 45 percent of the data accessed on the company's internal IP network is cached, said Nick DeVito, vice president of global network infrastructures at Merrill Lynch.

"We use caching for two reasons: To give users better response times and to conserve bandwidth to our ISP links," DeVito said.

The company has been using caching hardware and software from Inktomi for the past six weeks, and it has already seen a 24 percent reduction in bandwidth consumption.

Caching readily lends itself to content delivery, which, in simple terms, is delivering content to the edge of the Internet, one router hop away from end users.

That means less waiting for responses to requests for information.

DeVito said Merrill Lynch's caching device sits between internal and external networks, and stores, among other data, websites most frequently accessed by employees.

"We can't control the performance of the Internet, but by avoiding trips to the Internet via caching, we've increased the reliability of our own intranet," DeVito said.

IT managers first get sensitized to the need for caching when their pagers and phones get clogged with complaints about poor Web response times, said Gene Austin, vice president and general manager of the Internet server products group at Dell.

Cisco on Tuesday unveiled a number of products aimed at enabling Internet business applications. A feature of its router operating system, IOS 12.0, is called network-based application recognition (NBAR).

NBAR analyzes application traffic patterns. If there is a Web cache protocol attached to a user request, the request is sent to a flow management agent and then forwarded to Cisco's new Cache Engine 500 series to accelerate content delivery.

Stan Herrera, data network manager at the State of Alaska Department of Information, is beta testing NBAR. The state's network comprises 300 routers, linking agencies across the state via frame relay.

"We've experienced tremendous growth on the network, which is leading to congestion," Herrera said.

In the past, the department simply added bandwidth.

"But that is not a fiscally responsible answer anymore," he said.

Herrera said the Cisco product appears to let routers make smart decisions about traffic on the links and set priorities about which content should head where.

"IT managers can set up their networks so that accessing internal URLs takes higher priority than someone just going out on the Web," said Peter Alexander, Cisco vice president for enterprise marketing.

Cisco said its Cache Engine 500 series is available. The Cache Engine 505 for enterprise branch offices lists at $4,995. The Cache Engine 550 for the data center is $11,995. And the 550DS3 for large service providers costs $45,000. IOS 12.0 is available.

At ISPCon, Inktomi said it will team with Sun Microsystems to provide an engine for makers of smart caching appliances. Dell and Edgix, a content delivery company, agreed to work together to speed the delivery of Web content.

And Novell revealed partnerships with Akamai Technologies and Edgix. Both companies will make their content delivery services available to users of Novell's Internet Caching System.

One other indicator of just how hot caching has become: Akamai experienced a more than fivefold gain in its IPO share price, giving the company a market capitalization value of more than $15 billion. In its first nine months, Akamai's revenue was $1.3 million.