The Internet is diffused, spread out over the globe in a vacillating alliance between man and machine. So why should content be delivered from the nearest server? One software firm figures it's time to divvy up content contacts and make Net delivery more efficient.

by Jeff Goldman [February 22, 2001]

California-based WebEver Inc. debuted its Distributed Web Delivery (DWD) software at last week's DEMO 2001 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The software solution set enables hosting providers, data centers, and others to offer accelerated global content delivery as a value-added service.

The company recently introduced its first client to the public, hosting service provider Multacom, which serves up Web sites from 43 locations in the U.S. and China.

Kimberly McDonald, Multacom chief executive officer, explained why the company opted to use the DWD solution to offer advanced content delivery as a value-added service.

"The WebEver DWD is cost-effective, scalable, and flexible," McDonald said. "We needed to get to market fast with value-added services, and WebEver's solution will make it happen."

Distancing points
WebEver's proprietary SmartRoute technology is built on a twisted premise—the quickest path may not be the shortest route—especially when dealing with the Internet. Even if a viewer is just a few miles away from a server, there's no guarantee that proximity will deliver a quick download. Sometimes, the fastest server for visitors is actually the one on the other side of the world—not across the street.

DWD developed a way to determine which content could be delivered fastest. It uses brief HTTP requests to study network congestion, server load, and geographic location. The program then selects the best server site according to delivery speed—not proximity or geography.

An online demo of the software downloads an image first with DWD and then without the aid of DWD—then it compares the speeds. According to Steve Byrnes, WebEver director of business development, the demo often determines that the best server for someone in California is actually one located in Tokyo, not San Jose.

"Things like that happen all the time on the Internet," Byrnes said. "That's the problem we're solving. Even though you might be geographically close to the server, it might be overloaded, or there might be some congestion in between you and that server."

Once the selection is made; DWD rewrites the HTML to redirect each user to the best server for the fastest access to the content (right). Byrnes noted that delivery speed is improved, made as efficiently as possible, without Net congestion getting in the way.

Passive solution for dynamic content
Tarny Perkins, WebEver vice president of business development and sales, explained that its primary target for DWD use is the Webhosting industry.

"They're [Webhosting firms] finding that their business is getting marginalized, because it's hard to differentiate one hosting company from another," Perkins said. "As that happens, they're looking for value-added services. And one of those value-added services could be content delivery, but if they outsource that to content delivery networks, they not only lose bandwidth to those networks, they also lose the direct interface with the customer."

The answer, according to Perkins, lies in software—which enables hosting companies to provide the solution directly to their customers as a value-added service, without relinquishing anything to a middleman. Perkins said client control is a key feature—DWD is a software solution, not a service.

"We're not a servicing company, we're a technology company," Perkins said. "We provide the ability to improve content delivery for independent hosting companies through our software."

Byrnes added that, DWD could provide enormous adaptability; easily handling whatever content is deployed because the application sits on a host's existing servers.

"Since it's rewriting what comes out of the web server, we don't care if it's dynamically generated content," Byrnes said. "We don't care how it got generated. It could be very complicated—there could be a database, an application server, whatever."

Pricing and deployment
WebEver currently offers two pricing schemes for Distributed Web Delivery. The software can be licensed for $30,000 per geographic location, capped at twenty million page views per month-or it can be accessed by subscription, which costs $2,500 per geographic location each month. A third option, which will be announced in the next month or two, will be an enterprise agreement for use within a corporate Intranet or Extranet.

And the solution shouldn't take long to set up-for a simple site, implementation just involves a week or two on a test server to make sure everything is running properly. For more complex sites, integration and testing could take several weeks to complete the setup.

Divvying up the Net
Perkins believes that global peering is becoming an increasingly common concern among content delivery services. WebEver may well have the perfect solution to level the playing field—on a global scale.

"You could very quickly create one of the largest virtual networks around," Perkins said. "If you had a major presence in Asia but had no presence in Europe, you could peer with a company in Europe—and if you wanted to work with a company in the United States, you could do the same thing.

"Distributing content with an intelligent layer that allows additional layers to be built upon it is a natural evolution for the Internet," Perkins summed. "It's not dissimilar from what happened with computers—it used to be all centralized, then it moved into distributed processing. So we think that DWD is a natural thing, because that's the nature of the Internet—it is distributed."

— End