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> www.emergencyemail.org/nasawang3. asp

What a piece of crap that site is. they embed the video on the page (and obfuscate the link) as if they have the video. the un-obfuscated link to the video is:

http://mfile.akamai.com/18565/wmv/etouchsyst2.down load.akamai.com/18355//wm.nasa-global/sts-121/STS- 121_launch.asx

Akamai has a fairly successful setup for precisely this: It's described at http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/streaming.h tml.

"Windows is a bitch to use. I don't use things that are too complicated."
"Dude, DOS is gooood! Linux is gooood!"
"The OS may run like a wet dream, but I wouldn't know, 'cuz I wouldn't use the complicated motherfuckers."

- "User Friendliness Goes A Long Way", in .WMV, or .RA.
, from Cyberpunk Fiction" , 1998.

"Windows is a bitch to use. I don't use things that are too complicated."
"Dude, DOS is gooood! Linux is gooood!"
"The OS may run like a wet dream, but I wouldn't know, 'cuz I wouldn't use the complicated motherfuckers."

- "User Friendliness Goes A Long Way", in .WMV, or .RA.
, from Cyberpunk Fiction" , 1998.

There are two major components that make ABC's video offering possible:

1) Adobe Flash Media Server, aka FMS. Streams Flash movies over HTTP, but does so in a "smart" manner so that video degrades based on the performance of the client and of the pipe.

2) Akamai, which hosts thousands of geographically dispersed servers across the world. Akamai licenses Flash Media Server and hosts it on thousands of "edge" servers, which basically cache the most popular videos and stream them out from the most efficient location.

However, Google Video and YouTube do not use FMS. Since it's not their content, they don't care about its reliability quite so much. They simply package up a video inside a Flash file and serve it directly to users. If the user doesn't have the bandwidth, the video hangs or other bad things happen. I am pretty sure Google Video and YouTube also do geographic clustering (co-location) in order to reduce lag abd bandwidth costs, but I'm not sure on the details of that.

Getting back to ABC, there are two differences between their business and Google's: 1) ABC takes the user experience much more seriously (since it's their content), and 2) ABC isn't a technology company. Therefore they'll pay a little extra for the reliability and quality of FMS, and they sign up for Akamai's services because they don't have their own server farms.

They probably use something like Akamai's network of distributed content servers. I'm fuzzy on the exact details but they basically set up caches/mirrors at 'edge' points of the network and use DNS voodoo to make sure you connect to the 'closest' server, transparent to the end user.

EdgeSuite is an Akamai product. If the FBI is using Akamai then that's not totally surprising, and they do.

What about going with a geographic DNS server? If your unaware of how these work the idea is that the DNS servers provide a different IP address based the IP address of the computer making the DNS query. The idea here is that any of the Danish users would get your time server and anyone making a request outside would get an IP address of your choosing (perhaps a D-link time server) This may not block 100% of the traffic since there are probably some D-link boxes inside the PIX network. One example site that uses this technique is Olympics.com. That site is served by Akamaai (http://www.akamai.com/) but several other companies do similar things (http://www.netli.com/ is another company). It is easy enough to make dns queries from different parts of the world to see how this works in practice. You have several choices for the DNS server to use. You might be able to team with one the industry players in exchange of a bit of publicity. CISCO built in DNS servers also have this ability so you should be able to do it yourself. It does require a bit of work and magic of cordination of IP/geographic but the big boys already do it and based on the huge amount it has already cost you it might just be the quickest easiest solution. You mention that changing the IP address of the GPS.dix.dk won't work. This is good news implying that the IP address in not hard coded and hence using the Geographic DNS server will work. Mike

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/press/press514 .html

I guess Rush made a smart choice in going with akamai. I doubt many blogs will bother to connect those dots and will instead run with the "omg teh mil1t4ry is t3h republican!!11"

The last time I looked Microsoft was using over 100 Linux servers to despense their wares, patches, updates, etc... Akai (sp?) was their contractor.

But back on topic, this guy cannot seriously have expected to help build the future of Linux at Microsoft... They probably wanted to learn from him very much indeed about how penguins can fly, but that would quite likely have been out of about the same motivation as the Fowling & Duck Shooting Association might have for hiring an ornithologist. ;-/

That's the magic of Akamai. There's a decent chance that your ISP has Akamai servers either right in their datacenter or nearby.

This is crazy, if content providers want to reach customers quicker, they have alternatives such as Akamai. ISPs generally get Akamai servers FOR FREE (they pay for hydro), and Akamai updates the servers for them. When local users go to Microsoft.com for example, they end up hitting a local machine on the ISPs network. There is no need to go "on the internet," so theoretically, the user can take advantage of the full bandwidth of their modem. This works out for the ISP because they can offer faster downloads to popular sites without having to increase bandwidth to end users, or the pipe to the internet, and content producers receive less local traffic and can deliver content faster. The content provider makes that choice without being forced, and this is usually welcomed by the ISP.

I just hope that BS customers have some alternatives in their area. I hope they can show Bell South that they will not be bullied. This goes for content providers as well.

ads typically aren't served directly through Akamais caching technology

Ads are served "directly" for their advertising customers. Akamai definitely serves up lots of other stuff. But, on a per request basis, ads are probably at the top of the list. These links are a bit old, but I'm sure there are others:

Yahoo! To Offer Targeted Local Advertising

Advertising.com Teams With Akamai to Advance Intelligent Advertising Distribution

Hitplay Media and Akamai Technologies Forge Strategic Technology Alliance for Ad Insertion

Solbright Joins Akamai's Alliance Partner Program to Provide Enhanced Delivery of Rich Media Advertising

What I was told when I was first introduced to the Akamai NOCC was that they felt that they were a NOC that delt mainly with other NOC's, which wasn't all that common when Akamai first got off the ground. They wanted a way to differentiate themselves from the NOC's that they dealt with, so they coined the term "Network Operations Control Center" or NOCC. There's a multimedia tour available on their website.

I think running a mail server is a bit more complicated than a webserver or a streaming server for video

It sounds to me like you don't understand what it is that Akamai does. They're not just running web & streaming servers on their 15k machines. They're distributing content in real time in a way thtat vastly improves user access all around the world. You may have heard when Victorias Secret held their first video-streaming lingerie show. Well their servers couldn't handle the load because of all the people trying to watch it. They became an Akamai customer, and Akamai was able to redistribute their streams in real-time all over the globe. To be able to take video (or just web content) from a single source and distribute it quickly and efficiently to thousands of distributed users in real-time is a huge undertaking. Akamai has some very impressive technology to be able to do this.

I'm not saying that running a mail service like Hotmail is a piece of cake, but I do think that what Akamai does is a lot more difficult and impressive when you think about it. If Akamai's distributed environment were to drop off the net then you probably wouldn't be able to access any of the on-line services of most of their customers. (And that's just a small subset of their customer base) The ability to keep websites like those of Microsoft, eBay, Fed Ex, Red Hat, etc. all highly responsive to end users is not a simple feat by any stretch of the imagination.

more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe ... are overseen by hundreds of administrators.

Heh. I used to work at Akamai which provides content delivery services for many of the biggest sites on the web. They have somewhere over 15,000 servers that are managed by tens of administrators, not hundreds. In fact, a typical NOCC (yes, 2 'C's for Akamai) shift at Akamai is only staffed by 8 or so people, with only a couple of senior level admins on call. And they're delivering all sorts of web-based content, including streaming, not just e-mail.
But then Akamai runs them all on linux, whereas I belive Hotmail is all Windows based. You do the math.

The girl in Cheech and Chong's "up in smoke" seemed to like it ?
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1099 235/a/Up+In+Smoke+(Sdtk).htm
http://mfile3.akamai.com/14122/rm/muze.download.ak amai.com/2890/us/usrm/_!/546/89546_1_07.ram?auth=d aEaddAa9bdcsdvcbaodIdmbadravcadCcU-bdL2F0-Ci-dggbc &aifp=1234&obj=v10212

The girl in Cheech and Chongs up in smoke seemed to like it ? http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1099 235/a/Up+In+Smoke+(Sdtk).htm http://mfile3.akamai.com/14122/rm/muze.download.ak amai.com/2890/us/usrm/_!/546/89546_1_07.ram?auth=d aEaddAa9bdcsdvcbaodIdmbadravcadCcU-bdL2F0-Ci-dggbc &aifp=1234&obj=v10212

iTunes Music Store is using Web Objects. Macworld reports in this article that it runs on Xserve and Xserve RAID and every investor knows Akamai (AKAM) is the bandwidth provider.

I dug this up on Akamai's website.

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/industry/nui/retail/

Google cutting in on Akamai's territory here?

http://www.akamai.com/

Half the big boy websites I visit seem to run through these guys. They seem to provide fat throughput for mega sites, apparently hosted in a distributed geographical fashion. I could just be imagining these things, though, because I really don't have a clue.

Rejoice in the sounds of HAARP presented by Art Bell, an avid HAM operator. Pretty weird sounds to be just for jamming signals. I think they're up to no good. 4 BILLION WATTS is a lot of power to be pumping into the ionosphere... http://mfile.akamai.com/5022/rm/artbell.download.a kamai.com/5022/clips/04/09/091904_what_is_haarp.rm

Sun's "grid computing" operation seems to be an attempt to find a use for unsold Sun servers, or at least to avoid writing their value down to scrap prices.

f you went to a big hosting company and said you wanted a thousand unlimited-CPU-at-low-priority shared hosting accounts, valid only from 2300 to 0700, you could probably get a really good price. If "grid computing" were useful, somebody would be doing this. All those nearly idle CPUs could be doing something.

There's a successful grid computing company: Akamai. What they sell is distributed hosting and cacheing, which they call "Akamai On Demand Managed Services". When the web site for the World Cup or NASCAR or Britney is getting millions of hits per hour during some special event, thousands of Akamai servers switch to serving those pages to handle the transient load. That's a successful "grid" application, and it's been working for years.

Akamai does more than serve pages. You can run your business logic, in Java, on their servers. So they're already set up to run user code on their grid. If anybody is going to sell grid computing profitably, it's Akamai. They're all set up to do it. Yet they don't.

I also tried running this on linux and got the same message. However, if you go to the website http://www.vividas.com/support/, and look under system requirements, it says that Vividas will run under Linux using WINE emulation if you have 192MB RAM, Pentium III or better CPU 450MHz or better CPU clock speed and an Accelerated Graphics card, with at least 4MB of memory. Its still in testing, however.

This isn't an example of a company ignoring the linux community. This is an example of a company trying to control distribution by using a proprietary format. It took over my entire desktop while playing...couldn't quit out of it until it finished...must be some sort of DRM scheme.

I think they would have been better off using a normal format...but this appears to be an industry format: http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/press/press518 .html for more details.

You can take off your tin-foil hat now.

oh? like,AKAMAI?

Yeah but if more and more content becomes Akamaized (or something similar), then a lot of the main download sites will be blazing fast, and won't use the upstream provider. Ofcourse this will only help for big sites at the present time, but common downloads won't be leaving the ISP. Using boxes like Akamai to download large quantities on one large central server make sense until every ISP can have 20Gbps backbone connections. We just put in a new 10Gbps backbone to replace our existing 1Gbps, but we only a few hundred Mbps to the Internet.

well there goes my karma for posting in sleep dep mode. by html i meant whole webpages. the bandwidth that pours thorugh a site like http://www.4chan.org/ is entirely in image files, and very expensive, especially compared the the minimal size of a .torrent file. speaking in purely hypothetical example here, a site could be generated with an image tag pointing to img.torrentjpg, and the browser could dynamically download the file from the peers and server it up for others (especially with decentralized tracking gaining use). kind of like http://www.akamai.com/ for the common man with at focus on bandwidth savings rather than fast distrubution.

It's from akamai, so it won't get slashdoted.

Akamai for static content and take a look at livejournal's setup for dynamic content (master-master replication based on mysql).

Other people are much more qualified than I to answer the number of servers questions though.

Akamai

It has been suggested in comments to previous posts that they are rolling out the SU selectively to different parts of the 'net to ease the load on their servers...

The process you suggest is not how Apple manages server load "bursting".

Instead, Apple is a customer of Akamai, pretty much the only vendor (now that they bought their closest competitor, Speedera) of distributed hosting for On Demand (burst) Management and Content Delivery (used for iTunes Music Store) for global enterprises. These folks handle sites like Major League Baseball who get flooded with traffic on opening day and during the World Series and don't need to invest millions in infrastructure to handle these high-traffic times.

If you want, take a look at the HTML source for apple's own websites. It used to be that all media (images, quicktime, etc) were served from an akamai URL but now apple has images.apple.com that must hide the Akamai relationship. Still, there are relecs like
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/apple/akamai/01 0500/keynote010500vod_300.mov
as an example.

The iTunes Music Store uses Akamai to deliver those great download rates for the 160,000 songs per day they sell.

More like they should ask Akamai since Yahoo relies on Akamai for its content delivery.

Hooray! You've just found out that Apple uses Akamai's Enhanced DNS service.

Apple was one of the early investors in Akamai and they've been using their streaming services for many years...

Their event streaming entry point is even http://stream.apple.akadns.net/ (although that's still pointing to the Music Event from a few months back).

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Give that man a cigar!

Just found the ad on the Pepsi website. Here's the link (cached on Akami). Sorry - wmv format only...

If you choose a standardized virtualized platform then you need not be limited to using in house clusters. Check out ActiveGrid(TM) info page, it includes support for third party distributed hosting provider such as Akamai, . Other providers in the future, will provide massively scaleable systems such as Cray's Red Storm Cluster. All running Linux.

I recall that MS used to use Akamai to mirror their website. If they still are, that would explain the non-Windows OSes in the list (which I can't see right now, as Netcraft isn't responding for some reason).

Although the caching solution seems intriguing, the onus should really be on the aggregator authors to do at least local caching for RSS access between "refresh" intervals and even better, use HTTP conditional GETs. It's also important to use sane default "refresh" intervals and constraints.

During our product's development, our debugging refresh interval was 5 minutes and hardcoded to Slashdot. As you can imagine, it didn't take us long to discover Slashdot's unique banning mechanism -- it woke us up to the problem of letting people check feeds way too often (this also before we had implement local caching).

However, if this bandwidth issue keeps getting worse, someone like Akamai is certainly going to think of a corporate solution.

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/about/overview.html/

Akamai is the global leader in distributed computing solutions and services, helping organizations grow their online businesses without growing their IT infrastructures. The company created the world's largest and most widely used on-demand distributed computing platform, with more than 14,000 servers in 1,100 networks in 65+ countries.

Now is the time to show how little I know from working with a company that housed servers for Akamai.

Akamai is basically a huge cache system. Many of the internet favorites that people hit on a regular basis are Akamai customers. Apple, BMW, FedEx, etc. They are all companies that know they have a pretty big userbase and need to be able to give those customers a good chunk of bandwidth. However it is impossible and impractical to install the needed bandwidth for one site .... say IBM.

Now, I know you say "But IBM is this huge goliath of a company that has customers worldwide." That doesn't mean it is cost effective for them to install 14,000 OC-128's to handle all the traffic. Akamai provides a way of distributing your information in a way that allows people to pull that information from a site that is technologically near to them.

Let's not go into how a certain cable company goes to *New York* before passing any traffic to *California* So I did not mean geographically near.

Anyway .... I know nothing about their rates or services or even if they are cheaper than running 14,000 OC-128's to your office. I like to exaggerate and embellish, ok. I'd hate to see the SONET gear needed to switch 14,000 circuits. But they would be a good bet for you. Because your customer would hit your site. Click the link for whatever 4 Meg, etc app you need them to run, the link would find the closest Akamai center and bam .... they'd probably be downloading it from Japan when they are in Wyoming .... but hey, what are you going to do with technology, right?

Just my three cents.

Specifically, their EdgeSuite.

From what I remember, you only pay for what bandwidth is consumed and since most folks will consider your e-card spam, that won't be many. The cost was fairly reasonable as well.

CDN from the likes of Savvis (think: Digital Island) or Akamai (Buyer Beware here) all but completely alleviate flash-crowd pain. Ask for a free trial or a trail period with no commitment as see what I mean. In fact, you're an idiot for not at least looking into this.

It consistently amazes me the verocity of the RIAA, MPAA, etc. What they are going after is the same intellectual property that they protect. Software, movies, videos, audio, and music.. it's all valuable Intellectual Property. Now, yes, it can be used for Illegal usage (Kazaa, bittorrent as it seems, Morpheus, etc.), but what about the illegal usage of software like, oh, let's say, Word? To construct a document that is completely against the law, about harboring terrorism, etc.

Or the illegal possibilities of using a FTP server or web server? IIS and Apache.. look out! Someone stick up a site that can serve up some divx files or some mp3s and they DOWN... but the software behind it's just fine?

Let's not go off too much here. How many RIAA/MPAA employees' kids are using this is what I want to know (let alone the lawyers defending them). I guess my point here is just that any software can be Illegal. Any service can be used illegally - go after UUNet and Broadwing and all the backbones - for providing the high speed platform for sharing the files. (I'll probably get slammed for saying that now because asir it's not legally possible to go after the ISP for user's issues... but it would be in the same sense that the software company's allowing illegal content to be distributed over their system.)

Let's just figure out a way to use software like this for a use like http://www.akamai.com/.. Mirroring the web and all of its content (legal or illegal) on the web would make all of our lives easier :-)

You'd be right if they were using the sort of setup you are describing, but they aren't. The Fine Article says they're using Akamai, which means there is no "they [sic] webserver."

On they chance you don't know, Akamai uses a world-wide mesh of webservers to serve up their client's sites. And since the site is full of video and such, one would expect this move to greatly reduce bandwidth expenses.

Regarding competence; glass houses, stones, etc.

-Peter

avi freedman, chief network scientist at akamai and all around cool cool guy and networking geek, made it to the final table of pot limit omaha at the world series of poker.

Yes it is - controlling that insane freak requires constant pressure, and Bush ignored the regime when they reneged - after Clinton was out. That's what presidents do: they keep things under control. Bush has controlled nothing but his critics. And don't kid yourself: they've got The Bomb. They haven't (publicly) tested it yet, but then it'll be too late. It's already too late to go back to the good old Clinton days when they were just a lot of work. If we're talking about ex-presidents, we might as well talk about Eisenhower, who created the stalemate, Nixon, who perpetuated it with both Vietnam and his China/Russia "detente", and Reagan / Bush Sr, who closed down the Cold War without cleaning up that nasty detail. But who cares? Now we're talking about getting a new guy to replace the incompetent who let Kim actually get The Bomb. Kerry might not be able to back them down with their new toy, but he won't be any worse than the man who Kerry reduced to tears in last week's debate.

[Apple's] got more bandwidth than Jesus.

Unlike Xerox, GE, IBM, Ford Motors, Halliburton (what the fuck?) and, yes, Apple, Jesus doesn't have a Class A NetBlock. Plus, alongside seemingly half of the Fortune 500, Apple has it's backend provided by Akamai, and frankly, that sort of setup wouldn't ever need resurrection, because it'd never go down.

However, Jesus does have the edge in RFC 2629: Delivery of Packets via Archangel and Shepherd.

[Apple's] got more bandwidth than Jesus.

Unlike Xerox, GE, IBM, Ford Motors, Halliburton (what the fuck?) and, yes, Apple, Jesus doesn't have a Class A NetBlock. Plus, alongside seemingly half of the Fortune 500, Apple has it's backend provided by Akamai, and frankly, that sort of setup wouldn't ever need resurrection, because it'd never go down.

However, Jesus does have the edge in RFC 2629: Delivery of Packets via Archangel and Shepherd.

Akamai (which is what Yahoo uses) moves around 15% of the web's traffic. A couple thousand /.'ers downloading a 30 megabyte file isn't even going to show up as a bleep to them, as terrible as that may sound.

. . .that your website named after some character from Garfield is sturdier than Apple's Akamai powered backend?

They've got over 14,000 servers in 1,100 networks. You've got, uh, a dual-Celeron, an Athalon, and a Vaio notebook. I know which set-up I'd bet on.

. . .that your website named after some character from Garfield is sturdier than Apple's Akamai powered backend?

They've got over 14,000 servers in 1,100 networks. You've got, uh, a dual-Celeron, an Athalon, and a Vaio notebook. I know which set-up I'd bet on.