Thu Aug 24 16:50:35 PDT 2000 — We have deployed a new Cidera (formerly Skycache) service adaptor here for satellite reception of Usenet news. The new unit should resolve some stability problems we’ve had with the old one, and in addition, it has a third Ethernet port which is dedicated to feeding pre-loaded content for Akamai’s caches which are hosted here.
The Akamai servers locally host content here at Sonic.net for major online properties including Yahoo, CNN, Apple and many others, and having that content pre-loaded via satellite is an additional performance win. See www.sonic.net/expansion/akamai/ for details on Sonic.net’s Akamai powered partnership.
Akamai’s colocated servers serve heavy content including images and animations directly to Sonic.net customers. This means that the HTML code portion of the web page comes directly from the website you’re visiting, but special addresses in the HTML cause the images to be served locally here at Sonic.net. The images and other heavy content on the website will often be more than 80% of the total overhead, so serving this content locally is a big win.
The five Akamai machines split the workload of caching and serving up these files. Each system is built out with a full gigabyte of RAM for top performance, and caches all requests to save bandwidth and further reduce the time required to serve the page. This results not only in peak performance, but also in bandwidth savings on our upstream connections. -Dane and Kelsey