By Rachel Chalmers
Inktomi Corp and Real Networks Inc no longer have the streaming media cache market to themselves. Network Appliance Inc has formed a strategic alliance with Microsoft Corp to deliver splitting and caching solutions for enterprise intranets. Inktomi and Real are going head to head with Microsoft and NetApp in the marketplace, concedes Network Appliance’s business development manager Ed Sharp, but the philosophy behind our cacheing solution is to implement those protocols in our appliance, so the customer get the appliance benefits.
The software being developed by Inktomi and Real runs on a general-purpose server. Sharp argues that appliances confer special performance and other benefits over all-purpose servers, because the application is natively embedded in specialist hardware. When someone is wanting to do a number of functions, their best bet – if there is any appreciable scale – is to deploy dedicated boxes, he says.
NetApp chose to go with Microsoft first: because we found them to be very open and cooperative, Sharp says. That doesn’t rule out similar deals with other streaming media vendors, and Sharp admits discussions are under way to that end. Right now, the market for streaming media cache appliances lies largely in the enterprise and with internet service providers. Intranets are a particularly promising niche. Say if you have a CEO briefing her employees on a quarterly basis, at the moment it’s difficult to use the intranet for that, Sharp explains.
With NetCaches placed strategically through the network, he says, you could have one stream going out from the corporate center to the enterprise data center, and from the data center that stream being split off and replicated to branch offices, where it’s split again for desktop. Unlike a peer-to-peer broadcast storm, this tree model would make best use of the available bandwidth.
