Caching Appliances to the Enterprise WAN Rescue

The problem is known all too well: Unmanaged streaming media can devour bandwidth on an enterprise wide-area network – particularly when consumed at sites with narrow pipes to the rest of the company network. The simple concept behind the solution -- caching and streaming content at distant sites themselves -- begets an implementation complexity with a potentially voracious appetite for human and technical resources that can be even more costly than bandwidth.

Enter caching appliances -- hardware/software devices, usually in 19-inch rack-mountable form, designed to make light-footprint enterprise streaming a low-maintenance proposition. At Streaming Media West 2001, vendors are showing proven, new, and upcoming caching appliances that will be of interest to any IT manager who hasn’t already implemented caching for corporate streaming.

Many of these companies’ products also power ISPs, public content delivery networks (CDNs) and network providers, but only applicability to enterprises is noted below. According to all the vendors we spoke to selling streaming caching appliances to corporate customers at Streaming Media West, the two biggest uses of streaming in the enterprise right now are corporate broadcasts and distance learning. Distance learning is also the unofficial, but repeatedly proven, return-on-investment champion of streaming.

CacheFlow

CacheFlow sells a complementary set of Web and streaming network appliances that can be used to build a full-fledged enterprise CDN (a CDN within a company’s WAN). Its Edge Accelerator streaming caching appliances are designed to work fine if there is just one installed at a single node in a WAN. Or, if appropriate, it can be managed as part of an enterprise CDN built from many such appliances working together. .

Inktomi

Inktomi offers a deep and powerful set of software products for very large customers, and its streaming caching capability is delivered as an extension (Media IXP) to its Traffic Server software. Because there are many customers who prefer appliances over setting up their own server and then installing and configuring the software, Inktomi has partnered with a number of hardware vendors who are putting the Traffic Server Media-IXP software capability onto appliances, including Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, F5 and 3Com.

Hewlett-Packard

HP had engineering and sales expertise on hand in Inktomi’s show booth to tout its new line of appliances running Inktomi’s Traffic Server Engine software and supporting a number of capabilities for all of the three major streaming technologies (Real, Microsoft and Quicktime). The products can, but don’t need to be, plugged into a larger Inktomi-powered enterprise CDN.

Compaq

Unfortunatly, although Compaq was posted as a partner in Inktomi’s booth and Compaq will almost certainly be releasing appliance products using Inktomi’s streaming cache software within a few months, the company was not prepared to discuss the details. Compaq shops will want to dig for details.

Infolibria

Infolibria’s Media Mall products are actually streaming server appliances as well as caching appliances (in most cases, caching appliances require an origin streaming server). To clarify, both capabilities are provided in the same box, and a box with only a caching capability cannot be purchased. This changes the equation a bit in contrast to the products listed above, but it does have caching capability and the streaming server appliance aspect will be attractive to some. .

Vividon

Vividon’s corporate crosshairs are locked on streaming and nothing else. Vividon’s marketing materials claim that because of this focus, and because of very advanced technology (the company was founded by MIT Ph.D. candidates doing cutting-edge OS research), the company’s products can outperform competing solutions by a factor of eight to one. The lowest-end appliance Vividon offers has some streaming server capabilities (Apple and Windows Media are included; Real is extra) as well as cache capabilities. The products can work alone or can be teammates in management of an enterprise CDN.

Start Small

Although they have a whole lot more they can sell you, most of these vendors are eager to see enterprise users get at least one unit plugged into their WAN. The reason? Experience shows that once they have one, and realize how easy it is to set up, and how well it works, they will be able to justify the purchase of several additional caching units in a matter of weeks or months. That may sound like marketing hype from the vendors, and maybe it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.