Sun Microsystems Inc and Inktomi Corp are to take minority stakes in web hosting firm Digital Island Inc, as part of a $150m deal which will see DI deploy 5,000 Sun servers running Inktomi software.
Under the terms of the Sun and Inktomi deal, DI has agreed to buy 5,000 of Sun’s Netra and Enterprise 420R servers running Solaris and Inktomi’s Traffic Server and Content Delivery Suite caching products. These boxes will be added to the 1,200 existing servers in the network formed by the merger of DI with Sandpiper Networks Inc, which is still underway. The network expansion will cost DI $150m. But the company would not disclose details of how much of this was in investments from Sun and Inktomi, except to say both companies would take minority stakes.
DI hopes to target 350 cities with its network over the next three years, 100 of which will be in the US. Its strategy is to co-locate its servers with service providers offering DSL and cable net access services. The higher the bandwidth, the bigger the content, and the more chance of it getting tied up in a bottleneck somewhere, the logic goes. Streaming media is a main growth area. Sun COO Ed Zander told a teleconference that DI’s vision of distributed computing matched his company’s own.
Meanwhile, DI also announced it would buy internet technology that improves download times from SRI International – the former Stanford Research Institute – for $10m. The deal will see DI give the researchers $6m of shares on completion of the project, with another $4m in shares over the next year. The two companies will form a technology research alliance to develop a system to speed up the download of web data. DI was sketchy on the details of the patent-pending technology, but it is claimed to halve the current download times of all web content, including dynamic HTML, streaming media, and secure transactions.
