As long as we're talking about cloud networks, Akamai and Riverbed have finally let out details on their partnership for "optimizing" Cloud applications: http://www.nojitter.com/post/232601716/rakamai-makes-the-cloud-work-better While I'm familiar with Akamai (what they do and how they do it) I don't have any experience with Riverbed. Does anyone know what they actually "do" and how they do it? As usual it's tough to cut through the marketing on the little detail they make available (never a good sign). -- Kristian Kielhofner
In a message written on Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 10:09:27AM -0500, Kristian Kielhofner wrote:
Does anyone know what they actually "do" and how they do it? As usual it's tough to cut through the marketing on the little detail they make available (never a good sign).
It's been a while since I looked at Riverbed, and it was part of a test with other providers of the same technologies. So I'll give you a general overview of the sorts of things they do. "WAN Optimizers" implment an array of tricks to get more throughput out of the same bandwidth: - Compression, simply compress the data as it flows. - TCP optimization, work around known issues with window scaling and other TCP throughput problems by being a man in the the middle and faking out one or both sides. - Tricking LAN protocols into working over the WAN. This was one of the first big selling points. Various MS LAN protocls weren't designed for high latency links with packet loss, and so by being a man in the middle dealing with the WAN and presenting an optimized view they worked much better. - Data deduplication, cache blocks of data repeatedly sent (file sharing read-only documents is a prime example) at the far end and re-serve them without going across a WAN. - Caching various "soft failures" (PMTU failures, unreachables, etc) to deliver them faster. Depending on your workload they may be total magic, getting gigabits of throughput from a T1, or snake oil, not making a bit of difference. The key in all cases is they have to be paired though, one on each end of the WAN (read low bandwidth and/or high latency) link. To date that has limited them to deployments inside of enterprises for the most part, and often to places with a hub and spoke topology otherwise the deployment gets complex quickly. What I'm hearing here is one of these "boxes" is in the Akamai node. Now if the enterprise customer has one at their site you have two end points for downloading Akamaized content. This may be able to optimize throughput (say, via compression or TCP optimization) or reduce load/costs (say via data deduplication) or both for a customer who happens to have a Riverbed box on their network. I've got no idea how effective this would be on standard Akamized content, but if you already own a Riverbed it's probably some "free" optimization. Is it enough to make you buy a Riverbed if you don't already own one? Interesting question. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Found this in one of my RSS feeds this am: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNOXSmMfcGs Sort of explains it. On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Kristian Kielhofner <kris@kriskinc.com> wrote:
As long as we're talking about cloud networks, Akamai and Riverbed have finally let out details on their partnership for "optimizing" Cloud applications:
http://www.nojitter.com/post/232601716/rakamai-makes-the-cloud-work-better
While I'm familiar with Akamai (what they do and how they do it) I don't have any experience with Riverbed.
Does anyone know what they actually "do" and how they do it? As usual it's tough to cut through the marketing on the little detail they make available (never a good sign).
-- Kristian Kielhofner
-- [stillwaxin@gmail.com ~]$ cat .signature cat: .signature: No such file or directory [stillwaxin@gmail.com ~]$
/I think all the good stuff is in here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8G3K3hEE6U&feature=related --Blake / Michael Still wrote the following on 3/1/2012 10:34 AM:
Found this in one of my RSS feeds this am: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNOXSmMfcGs
Sort of explains it.
On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Kristian Kielhofner<kris@kriskinc.com> wrote:
As long as we're talking about cloud networks, Akamai and Riverbed have finally let out details on their partnership for "optimizing" Cloud applications:
http://www.nojitter.com/post/232601716/rakamai-makes-the-cloud-work-better
While I'm familiar with Akamai (what they do and how they do it) I don't have any experience with Riverbed.
Does anyone know what they actually "do" and how they do it? As usual it's tough to cut through the marketing on the little detail they make available (never a good sign).
-- Kristian Kielhofner
participants (4)
-
Blake Hudson -
Kristian Kielhofner -
Leo Bicknell -
Michael Still