This story appeared in the December 2004 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine.Click here to subscribe for free.
January 19, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As the Web hosting industry evolves to meet the changing needs of the markets it serves, so too does the technology that powers it. The rise of the application service provider model has created demand for acceleration technologies, while natural disasters such as hurricanes and catastrophes such as blackouts, have made storage, data protection and disaster recovery critically important. Meanwhile, the threat of terrorism, malicious cyberspace attacks and increasingly stringent regulatory standards continue to loom large over the industry.
It is these factors, and many others, that are driving innovation in data center technology, as a new crop of technology startups work to develop the next generation of equipment and software.
The shift from hosting Web sites to applications is a major industry trend that has created a whole new set of technical challenges for hosts. "The nature of what's being hosted is changing from the old, more consumer-centric to … a very enterprise-centric model, where you are delivering high-performance applications over a wide area network," explains Lydia Leong, principal analyst at Gartner. And because hosted applications require large amounts of data to be moved efficiently over great distances, says Leong, transaction acceleration, compression and optimization technologies have moved front and center in today's data center.
Riverbed Technology (riverbed.com), a startup working in this space, recently received an Investor's Choice Award at Datacenter Ventures, a venture capital event for data center technology startups, held in Redwood City, California.
The company develops transaction acceleration technology — a blend of compression, caching and protocol acceleration — that allows enterprises and service providers to overcome the slower traffic typical of WANs.
"The problem we solve is the problem of WANs and long distance data links, typically being very slow," says Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed Technology, and "the reason they are slow is because of a combination of very low bandwidth ... and quite high latency compared to local area networks."
Deployed in its Steelhead appliance, Riverbed's technology tackles these two problems, optimizing bandwidth by removing redundant traffic from WANs through its Scalable Data Referencing technology, and minimizing latency with Transaction Prediction algorithms that eliminate the majority of WAN round trips generated by common protocols such as CIFS and MAPI.
As a result, significantly less data is sent through network pipes, creating virtually LAN-like performance over WANs, says Riverbed. In Saldich's estimation, the bandwidth savings amount to between 70 and 95 percent and the improved throughput for applications is similarly substantial.
"The bottom line is we can speed up the throughput of a link by anywhere from 10 fold to 100 fold or even more sometimes." The impact extends into the data center as well, with the enhanced throughput of Web applications enabling service providers to consolidate and centralize their data center infrastructures, says Saldich.
Like Riverbed's acceleration technology, Redline Networks' (redlinenetworks.com) third generation cache "offers the potential to turbo charge the performance of Web applications," says Greg Ness, the company's senior director of corporate communications. Redline's caching technology, deployed in its E|X series of application front-ends, is able to reduce latency and limit the load on static and dynamic content storage, pushing existing servers to process faster. This not only optimizes Web application delivery, says Ness, but it ultimately allows service providers to streamline their data center infrastructure by eliminating the need for standalone cache servers. The consolidation does not end there. Redline's ultimate objective is to fold the many devices performing not only caching, but transaction and security functions such as SLL termination, authentication, compression, transaction validation and HTTP security, into a single-box architecture.
Application hosting also presents challenges for LANs within data centers. XML, quickly becoming a standard way to describe data, can burden servers to the point that it consumes up to 80 percent of data center processing capacity, according to some estimates. This ultimately leads to unacceptable levels of growth in application and database server farms deployed to accommodate the growth in XML traffic.
Conformative Systems (conformative.com), another of Datacenter Ventures' Investor's Choice Award winners, develops technology designed to solve this problem, accelerating XML processing up to 50 times faster than existing server architectures. The technology dramatically increases application performance and lowers the costs of deploying and managing XML-based applications, says Conformative CEO John Derrick, making it ideal for application hosts and enterprises doing high volumes of data transformation traffic. "We're talking about performance levels beyond a gigabyte, where you are actually doing the parsing, validation and transformation ... as fast as the network can keep up."
The reduction of overall data center infrastructure requirements is one of the most crucial benefits of acceleration technologies. However, these economies of scale can also be achieved through miniaturization and virtualization, a technology that is quickly making its way into the industry's data centers.
Jarad Carleton, industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan (frost.com), believes blade technology and its ability to miniaturize and save resources and precious data center space, has led the way in changing the face of data center technology in the hosting industry. And he is quick to point out that this development does not just apply to servers. "You are getting blade technology in a variety of other components within data center infrastructure."
While blade technology is useful for reducing the physical size of devices, virtualization is an effective method for reducing the overall size of data center infrastructure deployments. Dave Roberts, CTO of Inkra Networks (inkra.com), believes virtualization is the most critical emerging data center technology, and has the potential "to change just about everything." The technology's importance is simply a question of economics, says Roberts. "A virtualized infrastructure gives you the ability to take out cost like no other technology." Inkra's technology virtualizes firewalls, load balancers, SSL acceleration and security functions such as intrusion protection into a single appliance, allowing a service provider to deliver these services from a single device and eliminating the physical infrastructure formerly responsible for them. Virtualizing IP services, in turn, creates favorable conditions for automation, which cuts down costs, increases flexibility and reduces errors, says Roberts. In the last year and a half, uptake has been particularly strong, as industry leaders Savvis, EDS, IBM, Comdepot and Data 393 have deployed Inkra's virtualization products in their data centers.
Blade technology and the push towards virtualized computing architectures have also led to the increased sophistication of storage area networks, says Leong. "Clearly vendors are getting more and more sophisticated in what they can offer in storage area networks, and some of the moves towards blade servers and virtualized computing architectures are really pushing that."
Revivio (revivio.com), yet another Investor's Choice Award recipient, is attempting to move beyond traditional solutions with Time Addressable Storage, an approach that adds the dimension of time to data center storage.
Designed for use in large data center environments, Revivio's TAS system continuously protects and backs up data, time stamping and recording any changes that are made. By adding the variable of time, TAS can recover content at any point prior to a disaster or data loss event, and recreate it on the fly in about 5-15 seconds, says Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing and business development at Revivio. "The CPT provides continuous protection, meaning that all data ... modified or changed, that's under our protection, is restorable to any previous point in time. It's sort of like running a tape in reverse."
Wadsworth says Revivio's TAS appliance has been generating significant interest from managed service and hosting providers, because the technology can expand service level agreements to include recovery. A SLA that includes recovery, says Wadsworth, is stronger than the SLAs typically offered by service providers which only stipulate backup, and often only once in a day. TAS, he says, enables service providers to guarantee customers that their data has been backed up and, just as importantly, how they can get it back to them. TAS, says Wadsworth, is ideal for backups, and when deployed in remote locations, forms the foundation of a solid disaster recovery solution.
Content Addressed Storage devices such as EMC's Centera are another form of sophisticated storage technology quickly gaining in relevance, says Carleton. Centera is a network storage device that creates a unique identifier for content, based on it's attributes. Applications then use this identifier for retrieval. The technique is different from many other traditional storage solutions that force applications to retrieve data from actual physical locations without any other defining parameters. Storing data on the basis of content, EMC says, is designed to facilitate data manageability and enhance regulatory compliance, an important challenge in the wake of the accounting scandals that have rocked the telecommunications industry in recent years.
The success of new startups in the data center technology field is by no means assured, and will depend largely on the companies' skill in convincing both investors and customers of the value of their solutions. But the efforts of these companies, and the products they have developed, are convincing evidence of some of the emerging needs of Web hosting customers.
