In a bid to speed up access to its hosted web sites, Digital Island said this week that it has set up a series of local centers to mirror and cache content held at its four central datacenters. The San Francisco, California-based applications hosting and content distribution provider has set up seven local sites, called content managers, in the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia and three in the US in Honolulu, New York and Silicon Valley, and announced plans to open a further five sites by the end of the summer. Each local content manager site has high- performance processing, RAID storage, Cisco routers and other equipment, such as billing systems. Sun Microsystems Inc enterprise servers are used to house an integrated solution of caching and mirroring software, from Inktomi and Webspective respectively.
The system works by taking (mirroring) certain frequently- accessed content from the central server and placing it in the local management center. At the same time, other pages are dynamically cached to speed up download time. Digital Island says the system will also greatly improve the download times for applications that require high-volume delivery of bandwidth- intensive content to multiple markets such as streaming audio/video files, digital products such as software releases, MP3 audio files and online publications.
Mark Culpepper, Digital Island’s senior product manager said the company had decided to set up the new centers in response to customer demand. The problem with datacenters is that you can’t satisfy end users on a global basis, he told ComputerWire, it’s too expensive for a single company to put servers all around the world, and even if they could it would be too hard to manage. By contrast, Culpepper said it was much easier for Digital Island to set up the system because it has its own infrastructure in place already so it was just a question of deciding, strategically, where the additional server sites should go. He said the company had chosen the five countries primarily because they were the places where Digital Island’s customers said they got the most interest from on their web sites. It also used its intelligent network software, called Traceware, which generates reports on traffic flows to different countries, to pinpoint the best locations.
Five other sites, in France, Sweden, Singapore, China (Hong Kong) and Brazil will be finished by the summer and Culpepper said it was likely that additional centers would be added in the future. He said that Digital Island was also looking at ways to expand its offerings. At first, the company wants to concentrate on getting a robust and flexible infrastructure in place, he said, but then it will gradually bolt on new services, although he declined to give any specific details other than that announcements would be made within the next six to eight months.
