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Akamai & Digital Island Patent Clash

Posted by Hemos on from the i-shall-duel-to-the-death dept.

rf600r writes: "In a NutShell: Akamai does content delivery. Digital Island does content delivery. (DI, however, actually has a network, too. Not just boxes.) In order to effectively deliver content to the end-user from the best server, Akamai uses a 'secret sauce' they say they invented. Digital Island uses a 'secret sauce,' too. Now, Akamai has sued Digital Island saying they stole Akamai's 'secret sauce.' DI responds with a counter-suit saying Akamai actually stole the idea from them. Is it even the same technology? Who knows ...

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:glorified squid... by austad · · Score: 5

    Oh yeah, incendentally, F5 networks has a product called 3dns which works like this:
    1. client looks up www.whatever.com
    2. client's nameserver queries the 3dns system that's authoritative for whatever.com
    3. 3dns hands back a random IP for one of the different data centers, but inserts a very low TTL
    4. 3dns tells the 3dns systems (or the BigIP systems) in the remote data centers to gather path metrics of the client's nameserver (using UDP probes, pings, etc...)
    5. Remote centers send metric info back to the main 3dns unit
    6. Subsequent requests for www.whatever.com result in being handed the ip for the logically (not necessarily geographically) closest data center.

    I'm fairly sure this is how Akamai's system works. I couldn't find any patents on the procedure. F5 does have a patent on load balancing technology, but it looks like it only covers their BigIP product.

    F5's 3dns has been around longer than Akamai also, so if they're claiming this as part of the lawsuit, there is prior art.

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  2. glorified squid... by austad · · Score: 5

    Here's the patent they are fighting about.

    It really looks to me like a glorified squid setup. Squid does exactly the same thing (distributed servers that can talk to each other and serve up content that another server already has). Squid doesn't accept URL's the way akamai's system does though. As far as having the client directed to the closest Akamai server, I think that's all done in DNS, and Akamai does not own any patents like that. This patent comes close to the DNS part of it, but it also references a few others that may be better.

    As far as I'm concerned, I don't think either of these companies really "invented" anything. Everything they are using is prior art. They just happen to use it in a different way than anyone else. Now if only they could patent their business model... :) Who knows, with the stupid patent people we have, they may just be able to slip it through.

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