This expansion in its corporate ambitions is the direct result of the Mountain View, California-based company’s recent alliance with Verizon Communications Inc, underscoring the latter’s Application Acceleration Suite, unveiled in May.
The privately held company wouldn’t have the firepower to go down the branch office or corporate intranet independently, acknowledged Willie Tejada, its senior VP of marketing and business development, but as a partner of Verizon it’s a natural direction for us, he said.
Netli was founded in 1999, the vision from the outset being to deliver Web acceleration not as a device sold to an enterprise, but rather as a managed service. Those were the heady days of content delivery networks (CDNs), which also sought to address the problem of wide-area link latency by putting caches for the content out at the edge.
Netli’s take on the problem, however, was to accelerate the HTTP and, as the internet has involved, HTTPS traffic, such that you could take away the need for edge caches, the only reason you’d continue to deploy them being to offload some of the work of the origin infrastructure, Tejada went on.
To this end, it has created a meshed overlay network across the global internet, comprising 32 virtual data centers around the world, its claim being that they are never more than 15 milliseconds from the person accessing the corporate website.
Meanwhile in the data center of the corporate customer whose website traffic it is accelerating, Netli places what it calls an application access point.
While local comms, between the origin Web server and the AAP and between the VDC and the person accessing the site, go over normal HTTP or HTTPS, between the VDC and AAP they run over a proprietary, Netli protocol, which is where the acceleration takes place.
The Netli protocol removes not only the inherent inefficiencies of TCP, with the three-way handshakes and the time taken to establish and tear down sessions, but also the way HTTP uses TCP, which normally only compounds that inefficiency, said Tejada.
He referred to the fact that, when downloading a webpage, HTTP sets up a new TCP connection for every object on the page, thus multiplying the number of three-way handshakes and so on.
Even the Google homepage, which has almost nothing on it, requires 16 round trips, he said.
The Netli technology, on the other hand, maintains the TCP session between VDC and AAP permanently on, thus significantly reducing the number of round trips required and enabling what the company calls a LAN-like experience, with the added advantage over CDNs that it is bi-directional, such that uploads from end users to websites, can also be accelerated in the same way.
Corporate customers using the service enable access to the overlay network by effecting a C Name change in their DNS server to force a redirect to the nearest VDC instead of the origin Web server, whereupon the Netli technology can kick in to accelerate the communications.
Verizon chose Netli to provide the acceleration service for Application Acceleration Suite, with the overlay running across Verizon’s global network infrastructure. The rationale was twofold, Tejada argued.
They do a lot of hosting, so they understood app value added services and knew what our Layer-4/7 approach meant, whereas a lot of their competitors tend to think more about Layers 2 and 3, he began. And in choosing a technology that was already being provided as a managed service, they got it ready made.
What the partnership enables, aside from the ability to underscore a service from a global player like Verizon, is the potential to develop in the direction of corporate intranets, i.e. private networks instead of just the extranet/internet scenario.
We’ll have the opportunity to get our AAPs and VDCs onto its customers’ private networks, Tejada argued.
That will also mean addressing more protocols that just HTTP and HTTPS, of course, and Tejada said MAPI (for Exchange environments) CIFS and Citrix are others for which Netli will need to develop an acceleration capability if it is to take on the companies currently offering the technology as a device rather than a service.
Of course, the likes of Packeteer (with Orange Business Services) and Ipanema (with BT Global Services and BT Infonet) are already partnering with service providers for just such managed services, so Netli will need to be fleet of foot if it is to match their protocol capabilities. Tejada said the company will be in a position to announce such an expanded capability early next year.
Another area Netli plans to expand is, ironically, in CDN. It already offers caching as an option at the VDC, precisely because there is still value to be added in offloading some of the work of the origin web server, particularly with the proliferation of rich media content and the emergence of Web 2.0 sites like MySpace and YouTubes. Furthermore, where its kit once sat alongside and worked in tandem with equipment from the likes of Akamai, the latter itself begun offering acceleration last year, prompting Netli to start offering caching in its own right.
