The company made a deal with IBM last year to deploy WebSphere J2EE-based application servers on its network of edge-of-internet servers, in order to offer the EdgeComputing service, essentially computing power on demand.

Akamai also has a deal with Microsoft to deploy its .NET servers on the same network, but Weihl told ComputerWire that, while Akamai has no firm launch date yet, .NET will likely come mid-to-late 2004.

We had a reduction in staff in October, Weihl said, explaining that the remaining staff chose to focus on getting the WebSphere deployment up and running over the last six months. The .NET work is moving a little slower.

The company has been using Tomcat, an open-source application server, on its network since the middle of last year, but Weihl said this was primarily to run presentation-layer application logic, whereas WebSphere is enterprise class.

EdgeComputing customers will be able to increase the performance and scalability of their web applications by pushing some application logic out onto Akamai’s network, which is optimized to deliver content faster to end users.

We’ve seen applications see a factor of 10 improvement in performance, some much higher, Weihl said. But the main benefit is being able to deal with unexpectedly high traffic loads without a reduction in performance, he said.

What you’re also getting is an immense increase in scalability, Weihl said. When [the web site] is lightly loaded, you’re not going to see an enormous increase in performance.

Akamai, having sustained a peak network size of around 13,000 servers, went up to 15,000 during the first quarter. But Weihl said that was in anticipation of increased traffic during the war in Iraq, rather than scaling up for the EdgeComputing service.

An Akamai edge server will not do everything a WebSphere at an origin site can do, Weihl said. Some functionality had to be eschewed for the sake of security – such as the ability for an edge application to access the local file system.

Weihl acknowledged that security will be a barrier for some large paranoid companies, and suggested that such customers will probably start off deploying just presentation-layer logic onto Akamai, rather than their crown jewels.

But Akamai does have plans to increase the amount of functionality available. Weihl said that, for example, next year the company will likely add read-only database functionality to the edge, with read-write access coming later.

EdgeComputing Powered By WebSphere has not yet been priced, though it will likely be based on resources consumed. IBM Global Services will offer the service, which requires a certain degree of implementation work.

Source: Computerwire