nanog mailing list archives

Re: Content Delivery Networks/GSLB


From: alex () yuriev com
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 19:16:50 -0500


I need to know about the technology and how the solution/company (such as
Akamai) caters its customers. Do they mirror the content across their
server's network? If this is the case then how a request is directed to
the closest and lightly loaded server on Internet? There are other
hardware (GSLB on F5, BigIP and Cisco CSS) and software (ultraDNS)
solutions in the market as well but its difficult to relate those with a
CDN solution such as of Akamai's or others. Does anybody have experience
with F5 or BigIP GSLB solutions? I would appreciate if somebody can help
me out here as well.

The answer to such general questions is called "know-how". Companies in
business of selling products based on the "know-how" tend not to tell their
competitors how that "know-how" works, since those companies spent millions
of dollars developing that "know-how" from the paying the pointy-headed
Ph.D.s to do theoretical work to spending enormous amounts of money on
deployment.

The way to benefit from the "know-how" without spending all your money on
the pointy headed Ph.D.s is to buy/license/use it or hire a team or people
who in exchange for something else (such as money, sex, suitcases of
cocaine, F-18s) will either provide that "know-how", develop a "know-how" or
explain to whoever hires them that it is cheaper to buy the service.


As far as F5 or BigIP go, they work just fine for website load-balancing.

Alex


Current thread: