[75193] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Content Delivery Networks/GSLB
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (alex@yuriev.com)
Mon Nov 8 19:32:31 2004
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 19:16:50 -0500
From: alex@yuriev.com
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <8f80a02a0411081306225bf4dd@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> I need to know about the technology and how the solution/company (such as
> Akamai) caters its customers. Do they mirror the content across their
> server's network? If this is the case then how a request is directed to
> the closest and lightly loaded server on Internet? There are other
> hardware (GSLB on F5, BigIP and Cisco CSS) and software (ultraDNS)
> solutions in the market as well but its difficult to relate those with a
> CDN solution such as of Akamai's or others. Does anybody have experience
> with F5 or BigIP GSLB solutions? I would appreciate if somebody can help
> me out here as well.
The answer to such general questions is called "know-how". Companies in
business of selling products based on the "know-how" tend not to tell their
competitors how that "know-how" works, since those companies spent millions
of dollars developing that "know-how" from the paying the pointy-headed
Ph.D.s to do theoretical work to spending enormous amounts of money on
deployment.
The way to benefit from the "know-how" without spending all your money on
the pointy headed Ph.D.s is to buy/license/use it or hire a team or people
who in exchange for something else (such as money, sex, suitcases of
cocaine, F-18s) will either provide that "know-how", develop a "know-how" or
explain to whoever hires them that it is cheaper to buy the service.
As far as F5 or BigIP go, they work just fine for website load-balancing.
Alex
