A PAIR OF leading CDN (content delivery network) vendors will go head-to-head at Internet World this week and unveil expanded service packages designed to combat customer pain points associated with their offerings, including disaster recovery and security and traffic management.

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Akamai Technologies will introduce its new beefed-up EdgeSuite for Business Continuity solution. The flagship service has been expanded to include EdgeSuite Site Shield, which sits between a server and the Internet; site failover options, to replace costly mirror sites; and distributed DNS and denial-of-service (DoS) protection across its servers, said Kieran Taylor, director of product management for Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai.

"An offering like EdgeSuite provides some level of protection that a CDN solution dilutes," Taylor said.

Meanwhile Cable & Wireless subsidiary Digital Island will roll out at Internet World its ITM (Intelligent Traffic Management) service that offers users a smaller slice of the larger CDN pie. ITM provides a layer of intelligent traffic redirection designed to improve data center performance.

"We had demand from subscribers who didn't want a full-blown CDN, but had a handful of data centers and wanted a service that provides a bombproof form of DNS," said Paul Stolorz development manger at Digital Island in San Francisco.

Amtrak, which will be introduced as a new Akamai customer this week, said the massive travel crawl following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11 threw the railroad vendor's Web site into a tailspin of maxed-out bandwidth capacity.



"The response [time] was so slow [the site] wasn't very helpful to customers. The more customers signed on, the worse it got," said Mary Cortina, director of e-commerce in the IT area for Washington-based Amtrak.

Cortina said that Akamai, behind its EdgeSuite software, was able to push traffic through to ticketing applications and call centers, and also eased all bandwidth problems associated with the site overload.

Amtrak.com's caching and page delivery has vastly improved with EdgeSuite, she added. Previously, Amtrak hosted its own Web site on seven Sun 250 Web servers. The company now shares those duties with Akamai.

Joel Yaffe, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group, said that Akamai has been under pressure over the last year from players such as Digital Island, AT+T, Digex, and Qwest to retain its perch as the "top dog" in the CDN market. While Akamai has the capability to lend credibility to a client's Web site and businesses, its lack of existing relationships and deep financial pockets poses the company a serious threat, Yaffe noted.

"[Akamai is] changing their business, shifting from hosting content to presentation layer. It does put them on different [level]," Yaffee said. "Customer priority No. 1 is to cut cost. EdgeSuite ... allows organizations to drastically leverage the infrastructure you have to manage. It ties it closely together with application and databases."

Digital Island's ITM service allows customers to use their own infrastructures and data centers, preventing further hardware investments, Stolorz said.

"If someone has already spent the time and effort to build out data centers, [it] is more cost-effective to subscribe to a service like ITM to make sure DNS requests are routed to the right server," he said. "This way, you make sure people who are trying to get through to your site can get through, but you don't have to pay for or invest in the whole CDN offering."