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	August, 2004
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	Netli Building Customer Momentum Netli pumps up SSL performance Netli Adds App-Level SSL To Ultra High Speed Network Case Study: Netli's NetLightning Wormholes for Web Applications
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	Netli unclogs the Web Netli looks to cut 'Net delay Netli Offers Application Delivery Netli Aims at Akamai Express Apps Delivery Netli Unveils World's First Application Delivery Network Netli Speeds Web Apps Netli Launches NetLightning Application Start-up offers to speed Web services Netli strikes down app delays

Netli Aims at Akamai with Web Performance Service

Computerwire, Kevin Murphy: April 21, 2003

Palo Alto-based startup Netli Inc will come out of stealth mode today with an innovative service designed to speed web application delivery. The company says it is addressing an old problem in a new way, and has Akamai Technologies Inc in its sights.

Netli's NetLightning service offers to reduce multi-second web response times to "sub-second" performance, by reducing the number of roundtrips it takes for a user to download a full web page.

"A lot of companies are focused on addressing various performance problems," CEO John Peters told ComputerWire, referring to content delivery networks, compression and the like. "But none of them solve distance-induced delays for web applications."

With typical web pages, which have dozens of elements that are downloaded separately, there generally needs to be between 30 and 50 HTTP roundtrips between the end user and the web server, Peters said. NetLightning reduces this to about two.

"The bulk of the delay is the middle mile," said Peters. "It's the latency between the end user and the server, and the product of that number and the number of roundtrips required to move data from the server to the end user."

The way Netli proposes to do this is by placing servers near to the user and near to its customers' applications. Near the user, a "virtual data center" proxies for the customer web site. Near the site, an "application access point" proxies for the user.

HTTP requests made by the end user are aggregated by the VDC and converted into a proprietary Netli protocol before being sent across the internet to the customer site AAP. The AAP converts the requests back to HTTP, sends them to the nearby web server, aggregates the replies, converts them to the Netli protocol, and sends back to the VDC.

This reduces the number of cross-internet trips to a setup roundtrip and a transfer roundtrip, Peters said. Instead of getting 30 times the latency of the internet backbone for the full page to download, you only get twice the latency.

All a customer need do to get the system working, Peters said, is install the AAP in front of the firewall (or Netli can host it nearby) and point the application's DNS records to the Netli network. Netli has 13 VDCs in internet hubs around the world.

Peters said in most cases Netli will compete with Akamai's EdgeSuite, which promises to speed up application delivery by caching content at the edge of the internet, but requires some integration work. Although Netli can do some caching that is not its key feature.

NetLightning falls short of these established CDN services in some regards, in that it is no good for streaming media, for example, where the CDNs excel, as it currently only supports HTTP and HTTPS, though more protocols will be supported in future.

It is also only partially useful for dealing with flash crowds of abnormal traffic. In fact, one potential problem with the system would be that servers used to dealing with a web page download over a period of several seconds will suddenly be doing the same work in under a second.

Peters acknowledged the potential of that issue arising, but said he has not encountered it in any customer deployments to date. Netli has three named customers - Hewlett-Packard, Nielsen//NetRatings and Millipore - and several more unnamed ones.

The company has been funded to the tune of $21m in two rounds since it was formed in 2000, but decided to stay in stealth mode until now, when it has experience running its network and a number of successful customer deployments to talk about.

NetLightning is priced as a monthly service fee, starting at $7,000 per application. A typical subscription would be between $10,000 and $15,000 per application per month, Peters said.