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Wormholes for Web Applications I've talked a couple of times recently to a company called Netli. If you haven't heard of them, or their NetLightning service...well, you just did. And you're bound to hear more about them, or folks who try to copy what they're doing--building a network of what amounts to performance wormholes for Internet applications. The concept is pretty straightforward: by building a set of access points across the globe connected by a high-speed network not hobbled by the performance issues of Internet Protocol, they've created "virtual data centers" for their customers that bypass the latency of Internet routes and boost the performance of web applications for distant customers--not just web pages, like content staging services do. To do this, they've created a high-performance data protocol of their own that web traffic is tunnelled over, and access points that turn the data back into standard Internet traffic at the local ends. Using DNS redirection based on geography, users in, say, Japan get pointed at Netli's point of access in Japan instead of following the Internet's routes across the Pacific. Instead of it taking up to 10 seconds to load a page, it takes less than one. What's cool about this is that, unlike content staging services like Inktomi, Netli can deliver web pages reliant on real-time data--like ASP applications, corporate portals, and web services. The alternative for most companies would be to have regional datacenters serving up those applications--but the challenges of keeping them all synchronized, even with a private backend WAN, are daunting. Netli just inked a deal with IIJ to cobrand the service in Japan, and is already delivering the service to North America and Europe. HP is using Netli for its Asian developer portals. NetLightning addresses one of the problems of the "World-Wide" part of the WWW. Because of its DNS sleight-of-hand, it's transparent to people using it. And Netli is looking at other Internet applications--like, say, virtual private networks--as future services. For those applications, it remains to be seen how Netli's proprietary pipe compares to RouteScience's optimized routing in terms of performance and bang/buck. I'll be digging some more on this. |
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