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Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System
Frisky070802 writes "Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has an article by Simson Garfinkel that compares the huge distributed systems run by Google and Akamai and speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai. It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO."
I think there's plenty of room for both groups to be successful. One thing Google and Akamai have in common is their desire to hire extremely skilled people instead of making it up with large numbers of code monkeys.
;-)
I assume this is true, at least, because at some point each of these companies have hired a friend of mine.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
Wow, those are strong words. Real hard news here. News for Trolls maybe.
Mike Bouma
MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Expert, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius
Mike Bouma
MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Guru, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius
According to this Google already outsources their DNS load balancing to Akamai.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO.
:/
More reason to hope Google doesn't have an IPO?
Granted, I'm not convinced that an IPO would necessarily be a bad thing for Google (and I imagine that it might give a significant financial windfall for the current stockholders). Even so, I can imagine an IPO creating more trepidation that Google might, in the future, abandon its "don't be evil" policy and become a more "normal" company in that regard...
Which is probably a pretty sad commentary about what we consider to be "normal" for companies these days...
I did a quick look up of their finances and they are still losing money. I wonder how long they can keep going like this without being bought out?
There has been lots of speculation on google lately...they might offer stock, they might design their own operating system, why do we enjoy so much speculation about google? C'mon they're busy with Gmail and their secrecy will always out do our guessing.
:(){
Worldcom's major problem was that they couldn't keep their numbers straight about anything, and had a bad habit of lying to make them bigger. Google's habit is to lie to make the numbers smaller, to the point that they don't even check when compared to each other...
That's fine for Google's PR people to do today, but it'll never fly at a public company. And, the SEC's definition of "public company" doesn't quite require there to be an IPO, just simply having enough assets split among enough shareholders is enough to require all the same reporting standards that a company that has an exchange-traded stock has to live with.
So, this is one part of Google's culture that may be about to burst. You can't lie to your potential investors, and when you're a big enough company every member the entire public is considered a potential investor. These understatements are just plain going to have to start getting identified as such with cussioning words like "more than" or "over" coming before them in order to remain legal.
Didn't one of Akamai's executives (a founder maybe?) die in the September 11 attacks? Did that have any effect on Akamai's stock performance?
To be fair, there are important differences between Google and Akamai, differences that assure that Google won't be breaking into Akamai's business anytime soon, nor Akamai moving into Google's. Both companies have developed infrastructure for running massively parallel systems, but the applications that they are running on top of those systems are different. Google's primary application is a search engine. Akamai, by contrast, has developed a system for delivering Web pages, streaming media, and a variety of other standard Internet protocols.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
To put it mildly... merging the Google network into the Akamai network would likely be a nightmare. They're doing two completely different things. There's just no sense trying to mix them. So, there's not much of a reason for Google to either hire or aquire Akamai. They're devising GMail for their own resources, I doubt that'd be an application that could instantly port over to Akamai.
They might make sense to be commonly owned, but there's certainly no way that common owner would want to mix the two networks.
Lets hope we don't Slashdot google. Anyone have a mirror?
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
10,000+ servers!!!
:E
WOW!! 6 years ago Google was an ity bity startup in someones garage.
A testimony to the American Dream or a fine example of monopoly at work? [OK there not 100%, but neither is MS]
Paranoia check? How much of that 4+ petabytes is devoted to YOU?
May the Maths Be with you!
Maybe akamai can get some additional revenue by selling text links on their homepage. Akamai's PR8 could boost my rankings for certain keywords on google!
but it's been done a few times already. Not really funny anymore.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Fall of 1999 - Akamai is at $150 per share shortly after IPO.
Jan 2000 - Akamai is at $325 per share.
Now the interesting bit. If someone were to have $650 laying around and bought 2 shares of Akamai in January of 2000, they would have about $28 left now.
If I had, instead, in January of 2000 bought 59 12 packs of rolling rock beer for $11 each w/deposit (which I assure you was around the going rate back then) in a bottle-deposit state, I could have enjoyed all of that beer and I'd have $36.40 if I turned the bottles back in.
Moral: drink more beer, speculate on the stock market lessvisit the internet's oldest currently operating people webcam: www.mitwebcam.com
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
please can i have just one :-)
I was amazed with the quality of the video - almost no latency (when compared to simultaneous TV broadcast) and very high resolution. Some investigation revealed that they were caching video off the local Akamai servers in the area. Akamai is underrated for sure - atleast compared to Google but they have the POWER!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Google & Akamai are similar in that they both use clusters of computers to do extremely high performance tasks. While there could be some great possibilities by combining the two, this is definitely not a "no brainer". Their models are different enough to make it difficult.
Akamai's business is distributing servers around the Internet, to maximize the efficiency of the web connections to them. They distribute the workload, and minimize the network distance needed for each person to connect. So, they need a large number of sites, each with a small number of servers (small relative to Google).
Google has a small number of sites, with a huge number of servers. Those servers are heavily dependent on one another. As mentioned in the article, they use Google's file system technology to aggregate to huge database. If that same structure was divided up into smaller chunks that were highly distributed, the back-end cluster performance would suffer because of the WAN links interconnecting them.
I'm sure Google will continue to grow, and create more data centers. But, they will need a different structure than Akamai uses.
I think that simon and garfinkle should stick to music.
NJ Local Music Scene
Or, you could actually read the article, wherein lies this quote:
Akamai's cofounder and chief technology officer Danny Lewin was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11 and was killed when the plane was flown into the World Trade Center.
You probably shouldn't click this.
I was amazed with the quality of the video - almost no latency (when compared to simultaneous TV broadcast) and very high resolution. Some investigation revealed that they were caching video off the local Akamai servers in the area. Akamai is underrated for sure - atleast compared to Google but they have the POWER!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In any other industry, this might be true. I'm not sure it is true here.
Perhaps I'm being simplistic, but wouldn't it make some economic sense to be in the business of searching and indexing the very same web pages that you are already hosting? Wouldn't there be some cost savings? Some, gulp, synergies? Savings on hardware? Bandwidth? Optimizing your web hosting to make search more efficient or productive?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
You know, in the past few months, I've heard more about one company buying another company than I'd care to hear:
IBM will buy SCO
Apple will buy Real
Microsoft will buy everyone
And now this. Don't people realize there is more to 'buying' a company than ordering fries and a coke? Also, sometimes its advantages not to buy a company, but rather, to create a partnership, or even to just buy or license IPO.
The *other* way companies of similar persuasion exist at the same time, other than just eating each other, is to COMPETE.
That is the point of our economy. Rather than having large fish eat the small fish, and then be left with nothing but big fish and us (fish food), the big fish and the small fish should compete for our business by making their offerings more attractive.
...Simson Garfinkel's other article titled "Parsly, Sayge, Rosemari and Time"
By contrast, Google has a whole bunch of computers in each of a very few places. This completely changes the economics.
The reason Akamai's premis is flawed is simple: core bandwidth is cheap, because the core was overbuilt during the bubble and because of the incredible advances in core technologies. By contrast, the last mile is still constrained, primarily because of monopolies and politics.
The effect of this is that once your packet gets from your house to the first router, the rest of the internet is all effectively an equal cost from you.
"has an article by Simson Garfinkel that compares the huge distributed systems run by Google and Akamai"
I'm not sure why he's even doing it, but Art Garfunkel should pick a better alias.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
I hope Google really is, as the rumors state, going to go nuts creating grid-type apps for general consumption. I have no idea what they might do, but it will bode well for Linux. Now, how's Windows doing in the grid field?
An article by Simon & Garfunkel?
Worst BBC News Stories
Slashdotted, here's the Google cache.
"Simson Garfinkel ... speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai"
Translation... Simson Garfinkel owns mountains of Akamai that's worth a fraction of what he paid for it during its IPO, and is hoping that his "speculation" drives its value up.
One of Akamai's hidden talents basically safely oversubscribe their systems because there's no way all of their customers can be at their peak resource usage at the same. Web usage is in part a zero-sum game... if thousands of people are running to their computer after being invited the same URL by a Super Bowl commercial, it's safe to assume that those thousands of people are not hitting CNN.com. Sure, some people not interested in the game might be at CNN's site, but they're not going to be part of the throng headed to the advertised site.
They don't really need to have enough systems so that every site can have its peak usage all at once. They just need to be able to absorb their market share of the entire World Wide Web activity at any given moment. They don't particularlly care which site you hit... they know that any spike at one is most likely going to come at the expense of other sites, and that they run a good chunk of those sites that are going to have the corrisponding decreases in traffic. They're basically assured that almost nobody downloads an iTunes song and watches a TechTV video clip at the same time.
I understand that we are not allowed to imagine beowulf clusters of these.
pity
" I mean, where else is there to turn for something as strong as Akamai for a bursting-load application?"
This is a Viagra troll, isn't it?
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
The takeaway I got from the article wasn't Google buying Akamai, it was, as another poster mentioned, that there is no barrier to entry in the search market. If you couple that with taking advantage of Akamai's technology on the back end and some savvy, well-funded business people (their names begin with V & C), you could become the next Google, by beating Google at their own game and not have to worry about developing the underlying technology (which Google does).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...he repeated that figure of 1,000 queries per second--but he said that the measure was made at 2:00 a.m. on December 25, 2001. His point, obvious to everybody in the room, is that even by November 2002, Google was doing a lot more than 1,000 queries per second--just how many more, though, was anybody's guess.
What's obvious to me is that the metrics were taken at 2am on Christmas morning... not that they were taken a year earlier.
What cod piece?
Akamai co-founder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin died in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the World Trade Center north tower.
Think that had any negative effect on Akamai's fortune?
I just want to say thanks, for you vocalising what so many of us think about the retarded sense of humour some of these people have.
I was sitting here contemplating suicide, but your funny rant really cheered me up somehow. Thanks man - and I really mean it, thanks.
Hmmm.
# ping www.google.com
PING www.google.akadns.net (216.239.51.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=289.6 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=251.1 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=278.4 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=298.3 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=256.9 ms
...at least from a customer's prospective.
We're one of Akamai's larger customers.
We use them because the traffic patterns on our websites include 10x (and up) spikes in traffic during news and weather events.
These events are specifically times when we CANNOT be unavailable. We live and die by those events.
But, those events are not very often - perhaps a few per month.
Akamai allows us to serve this massive traffic spikes without requring us to maintain a massive overhead in servers and bandwidth that goes unused most of the time.
Each site in our network has a geographically localized audience, but across the network as a whole, we have users everwhere.
Edge Serving allows us to provide extremely low latency service to all of those users - and providing a much greater resistance to core internet connection issues.
Further, Akamai provides us with massive redundancy. A single (or group of few) datacenter, not matter how large and well designed, is still not as redundant as the Akamai network.
Finally, if our origins become unavailable for whatever reason, our sites live on, completely available on the edge (albeit, growing stale as time goes on) while we restore origin connectivity.
Then we have EdgeJava, Akamai Network Storage, the video serving, etc.
Our latest web project (which will become quite popular in mid-late August) will be served entirely from the Edge using Akamai.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
If they're doing two totally different things, then there's no product overlap (and thus need to reconcile drop otherwise valuable product lines). So that's usually *good* for a merger. Particularly if the two companies sell to the same sort of customers in a reasonable number of cases. If that's true there might be some sales savings from calling on the customer with one sales call from a combined entity rather than two sales calls if run totally independently. Likewise there would be ability for product tie-ins, bundling, marketing, advertising, etc.
Google sells keywords to online businesses, while Akamai sells DNS and video hosting. I think you could have a business that does all of the above and benefits from having them all under the same roof. So I'm not as pessimistic as you.
Also, GE does pretty well at buying companies that are totally different. I think where things go wrong is if the management of the acquiring company doesn't have the expertise to even understand/manage the acquired company business; e.g. Vivendi buying SGI or something. I think the Google management would be able to manage a business like Akamai's; it's reasonably similar in many respects.
I'd consider it if I were Google. Whether I'd pursue it or not would depend on Akamai's valuation and how much money they're losing, as well as whether the distraction is worth the synergy and whether Google couldn't build it for cheaper than they could buy it (with opportunity costs factored in).
--LP
I have no idea why that came to mind...
If I never read another article by that charlatan Simson Garfinkel it will be a week too late.
He makes us Jews everywhere look bad.
Boycott him!
For all the sites that have been slashdotted into oblivion, it would neat to have Akamai cache the target site and have Slashdot link via Akamai.
... or maybe it's a money issue. I dunno. Anyone able to confirm this?
Maybe I'm talkin' out of my arse and this isn't possible. It sounds plausible to me
m.mmm..myyy
Its called the 401 keg
When did Simon & Garfunkel become interesting in distributed computing?
Akamai and Google covers both ends of the spectrum. If you plan to monopolize internet services, buying both covers would definitely go a long way.
Back during the Internet boom, there were also some companies that did satellite multicast to ~600 servers around North America, which competed with some of the kinds of things Akamai is used for. (But that was the boom, and those guys are gone now.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Assuming those numbers are correct, and assuming they use several year old algorithms:
Google can break an RSA-512 key. 12 times a day.
It would take them 8 months to break an RSA-1024 key.
Of course this glosses over some of the technical difficulties (such as memory bandwidth, RAM, etc) but the interesting thing is that if they directed their gaze towards a problem of for even an hour, they could solve some truly monumental problems.
But, according to Slashdot, Google is good today, not evil, so we can expect them not to use their power for bad.
-Adam
Thanks to archive.org, you too can join in on the caching fun! If you want to post a web page's URL to Slashdot without having it, um, Slashdotted, you could use Freecache. If you run a major ISP or university IT department, Freecache could use you.
is that the ensuing waves of traffic to various news sites validated the worth of Danny Lewin's work. Akamaized sites held up pretty well on 9-11. That Akamai clusters served up a record volume of web pages that day was very obvious from where I sat; I saw the mrtg graphs from several clusters at the isp where I work noc (it's also fun to look at the graphs when Steve Jobs streams a Macworld keynote address).
From what I heard, Akamai gained a number of media customers as a result.
From the last time I posted:
>Sounds like you gave allot of
>money to MS for nothing.
Like Dire Straits used to sing:
"MS for nothing and the chicks for free!"
zeke
There's actually plenty of competitors for Akamai's product -- it's one of the reasons they're having such trouble getting to profitability. It turns out that a static edge caching service is, while tricky, not quite rocket science, and several companies have done it: off the top of my head, Speedera, Globix, and Digital Islands (or whoever owns them now; probably level3).
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Optimizing your web hosting to make search more efficient or productive?
Optimizing your paying clients' web-pages to have automatically higher search priority?
Yeah sounds $$$ since even all those spam emails only offer free PhDs and MBAs, never MCSEs.
I fed it with the query "dog" and expected to get back all hits for "god", but instead it redirected me to another engine :(
You didn't read the Logitech case??
The problem is NOT bandwidth. The problem is having enough servers for a single time offering-a contest. Logitech is probably going to run that contest during christmas time next year. Why should they invest a buttload of money and time in buying servers, configuring them, hiring personnel in maintaining them when they need it ONCE a year? That is gross wastage of money.
Thats why they hire companies like Akamai.
Stop talking out of your ass.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
"Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" FFS. Which are spices used for contraception and abortion.
Savvis ended up buying Digital Island/Cable & Wireless they are easily as good as Akamai.
t ml
See:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040420/205399_1.h
They also do the DNS for MSFT and software updates
Use the Googlebar
Google's main search page has a link that invites you to make Google your home page. If most of your Web voyages start with a Google search, clicking on this link might make a lot of sense for you. But you can do better.
If you use Internet Explorer on Windows, download the Google Toolbar from toolbar.google.com. The toolbar modifies Internet Explorer to add a Google search field right underneath the address bar. Once installed, you can do a search simply by typing the string into the toolbar.
The Googlebar also opens up additional Google features. Instead of searching the whole World Wide Web, for instance, you can restrict your search to the site you are currently looking at: just click "Search Site" instead of "Search Web." For example, if you use the Googlebar to search for my name on the technologyreview.com site, you'll get 157 hits, starting with my columns that have been the most widely cited.
Underneath the Google Toolbar's "Page Info" you can search for "Similar Pages," "Backwards Links," and see cached snapshots of the Web page (in case you think that it may have recently changed). The "Similar Pages" feature is a neat way to meet new friends: A few years ago, I asked for "Similar Pages" to my home page and was directed by Google to humorist Madeleine Kane--a strange choice, on the face of it. But it turns out that Madeleine's politics and mine are incredibly aligned, and I've enjoyed reading her stuff and corresponding with her. Without Google, I doubt I ever would have met her.
Gaming for Google
Many people ask me how they can increase their placement on the Google search results. The answer is simple and guaranteed: buy an advertisement.
Surprisingly, though, most people don't want to spend money to buy an advertisement on Google. I say that this is surprising, because these same people are willing to spend a lot of time and effort in an attempt to game the system. Such approaches are called "spamdexing," a contraction of "spamming the index" that originated back in the days when the AltaVista search engine reigned supreme. Back then, people could improve their position in the search results by including a word multiple times on the same Web page. People who ran pornographic sites put entire dictionaries (with tens of thousands of words!) on their Web pages in an attempt to increase their hits.
Google's value comes, in part, from its use of algorithms that help defend against spamdexing. If you don't want to buy an advertisement, the easiest way to increase your page rank is to make your Web site as useful as possible. Link to other sites; encourage people to link to yours. But don't link randomly: try to keep things on topic and on-target. Google's algorithms seem to reward good Web citizens. For example, two sites that heavily link to each other--and nowhere else--are ranked low.
One way to dramatically increase the usefulness of your site is to load it up with a lot of freely available documents. These documents can be HTML files, Microsoft Word files, Excel spreadsheets, or even PowerPoint presentations: the programmers at Google have figured out how to download all of these files, turn them into text, and add the salient information to Google's index.
What Google generally can't search is images. If you have, say, an old birth certificate that you've scanned and put on your site, you'll need to put a few sentences describing the document on the page where the document's link appears. That's because Google's engine doesn't do OCR--that is, it doesn't use optical character recognition technology to turn images into text.
The same is true of Google's image search system. Click on the Google "Images" rectangle and type in a search string and you'll find all of the images that are on Web pages that contain your search terms. Google tries to be smart by using various hints that it can find on the Web pages, but it's fundamentally trying to solve an extremely difficult problem. If you want people to be ab
Rule 1. Follow the money.
I screwed up and posted page 2 of a RELATED article in the same mag.
:
... Henry Jenkins @ 4/19/2004 6:08:32 PM. Tomorrow's Technologies Today.... TODAY'S ...
So shoot me for trying. It looked right
Technology Review: Getting More From Google
TOP STORIES, Google and Akamai: Cult of Secrecy vs. Kingdom of Openness.
www.technologyreview.com/articles/ wo_garfinkel060403.asp?p=2 - 56k - Apr 21, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.technologyreview.com ]
By Simson Garfinkel
April 21, 2004
"You should never trust this number," said Martin Farach-Colton, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, speaking a little more than a year ago. "People make a big deal about it, and it's not true."
Farach-Colton was giving a public lecture about his two-year sabbatical working at Google. The number that he was disparaging was in the middle of his PowerPoint slide:
* 150 million queries/day
The next slide had a few more numbers:
* 1,000 queries/sec (peak)
* 10,000+ servers
* More than 4 tera-ops/sec at daily peak
* Index: 3 billion Web pages
* 4 billion total docs
* 4+ petabytes disk storage
A few people in the audience started to giggle: the Google figures didn't add up.
I started running the numbers myself. Let's see: "4 tera-ops/sec" means 4,000 billion operations per second; a top-of-the-line server can do perhaps two billion operations per second, so that translates to perhaps 2,000 servers--not 10,000. Four petabytes is 4x1015 bytes of storage; spread that over 10,000 servers and you'd have 400 gigabytes per server, which again seems wrong, since Farach-Colton had previously said that Google puts two 80-gigabyte hard drives into each server.
And then there is that issue of 150 million queries per day. If the system is handling a peak load of 1,000 queries per second, that translates to a peak rate of 86.4 million queries per day--or perhaps 40 million queries per day if you assume that the system spends only half its time at peak capacity. No matter how you crank the math, Google's statistics are not self-consistent.
"These numbers are all crazily low," Farach-Colton continued. "Google always reports much, much lower numbers than are true."
Whenever somebody from Google puts together a new presentation, he explained, the PR department vets the talk and hacks down the numbers. Originally, he said, the slide with the numbers said that 1,000 queries/sec was the "minimum" rate, not the peak. "We have 10,000-plus servers. That's plus a lot."
Just as Google's search engine comes back instantly and seemingly effortlessly with a response to any query that you throw it, hiding the true difficulty of the task from users, the company also wants its competitors kept in the dark about the difficulty of the problem. After all, if Google publicized how many pages it has indexed and how many computers it has in its data centers around the world, search competitors like Yahoo!, Teoma, and Mooter would know how much capital they had to raise in order to have a hope of displacing the king at the top of the hill.
Google has at times had a hard time keeping its story straight. When vice president of engineering Urs Hoelzle gave a talk about Google's Linux clusters at the University of Washington in November of 2002, he repeated that figure of 1,000 queries per second--but he said that the measure was made at 2:00 a.m. on December 25, 2001. His point, obvious to everybody in the room, is that even by November 2002, Google was doing a lot more than 1,000 queries per second--just how many more, though, was anybody's guess.
The facts may be seeping out. Last Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported that Google had crossed the 100,000-server mark. If true, that means Google is operating perhaps the largest grid of computers on the planet. "The simple fact that they can build and operate data centers of that size is astounding," says Peter Christy, co-founder of the NetsEdge Research Group, a market research and strategy firm in Silicon Valley. Christy, who has worked in the industry for more than 30 years, is astounded by the scale of Google's systems and the company's competence in operating them. "I don't think that there is anyone close."
It's this ability to build and operate incredibly dense clusters that is as much as anything else the secret of Google's success. And the reason, explains Marissa Mayer, the company's dire
you could become the next Google, by beating Google at their own game and not have to worry about developing the underlying technology (which Google does).
That is totally the underlying tone of the article. I don't think this amounts to 'no barrier to entry' but this would remove barrier of proprietary and extremely complex technology our of the way.
humble and proud of it.
This isn't a great recomendation given the recent news about windows update struggling to remain available.
Back a few years ago (company was doing about 50Mbps sustained through Akamai) AT&T came and pitched us on how they were just as good as Akamai - except that they didn't actually have a large network of servers yet - just a couple here and a couple oversees - but that don't worry they were well-connected servers and could buy more someday.
Was quite the surreal experience. I think they really just wanted us to switch phone hosting facilities (were using MCI).
What a great place to work. It's been 2.5 years since I was laid off and I still miss working there. When Akamai streams video and audio, they actually transmit it 3 times and at the local server of the user, the packets are reassembled on a first come basis and transmitted to the user. Websites requested in local areas get cached locally, no matter where you are in the world. They mostly have linux boxes with a few wintels. Akamai definetly hires top notch people and knows how to take care of them. Morale was always high (until the layoffs haha). If I had the chance to work for them again, I'd sell my house and move to where ever they needed me.
/.
Yes, the product's quite real, and has handled a number of large customers. It's been a year or two since I've worked with it, but it works pretty well. The architecture is a smaller number of larger servers, mainly located at the peering points. Sounds like your sales rep really knew much more about phones than content distribution networks...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks