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Speedy web response, uninterrupted content delivery and reliable connectivity-these are the defining parameters of a robust service provider. Rediff.com, India's premier online provider of news, entertainment and shopping services had the same objectives in mind while building its network infrastructure.

Redundant, scalable and efficient Internet access is a key component for all companies today. These connections must be secured, flexible and scalable. And the best way to achieve these business objectives is by using content delivery solutions.

The Challenge
In exploring new business models and increasing value-added functionality to a network, content management is crucial for Rediff to efficiently deliver information to the end user and optimize bandwidth consumption. Venki Nishtala, CTO, Rediff.com explains, "The problem faced as an ISP is the tendency of not being well connected due to peering issues. This is an ongoing problem. So one of the priorities while setting up our infrastructure was to adopt a content delivery network to overcome peering issue as well as to cache content and deliver it to the right place with speed." Web hosting, co-location, caching and streaming are ways to improve the end-user's Internet experiences and so increase customer retention for the content owner.

The three key parameters that Rediff wanted to address using a CDN were: global delivery at lightening speed; high performance of website at all times; and ability to handle event-driven traffic spikes without expanding its Web infrastructure.

At the same time, Rediff needed to manage upstream bandwidth to strike a delicate balance between customer satisfaction and cost. It had to invest heavily in its own network infrastructure-load balancing for nonstop delivery, caching for speedy Web response, distributed, replicated servers to limit the impact of Internet congestion.

Rediff partnered with a Content Delivery Network provider, Akamai, to address every aspect of their business requirements. The Akamai Media Delivery (AMD) solution provides streaming, download delivery, http content delivery, and secure content delivery.

Solution in Sight
Simply put, the CDN delivered by Akamai consists of a dedicated network of servers, deployed throughout the Internet, that Rediff uses to distribute their content on a subscription basis. The CDN essentially served as an overlay network of customer content, distributed geographically to enable rapid, reliable retrieval from any end-user location. Web hosting, co-location, caching and streaming are ways to improve the end-user's Internet experiences and so increase customer retention for the content owner.

The CDN uses infrastructure technologies like caching to push replicated content close to the network edge. As a result, the stored content is kept current and protected against unauthorized modification. It has the ability to globally balance the load and ensure that users are transparently routed to the "best" content source. In addition, the customer-accessible traffic logs enable data mining for marketing and capacity planning.

"To serve the customer from the nearest point on the Internet, Akamai was a natural choice with a globally deployed network of 20,000+ servers spanning over 1,000 networks," explains Venki. With a registered user base of over 45 mn, Rediff serves 4 mn visitors everyday, most of them coming from India and USA. According to the company, more than 97% of Rediff content is served through Akamai servers and made available to global visitors. "While Akamai takes care of Rediff's Web infrastructure requirements, Rediff concentrates on development of core services," continues Venki.

Visible Advantages
"Akamai allows Rediff to provide a satisfying customer experience with lightning fast download of Rediff's homepage while simultaneously offloading
the traffic from Rediff's core servers," says Venki. Akamai's services have reduced Rediff's infrastructure overhead drastically leading to substantial savings on infrastructure costs and reduced management and capital overhead. It has also resulted in increasing the number of advertisers for Rediff.com

"We are also using Akamai's global servers that has dramatically reduced Rediff's infrastructure overhead, leading to substantial savings on infrastructure costs and reduced management and capital overhead," adds Venki.

Satisfied with the results, Rediff partnered with Akamai in 2005 to launch India's first online music portal. Rediff's e-Commerce Payment Gateway seamlessly integrated with Akamai's secure delivery and download service, making Rediff.com India's first online music retailer. The CDN provides Rediff the tool to manage, secure, control and report media file usage and ensure that only authorized users are accessing files. "This will let music companies, video content owners and artists tap the potential of the Web to bring content directly to consumers, and protect against piracy and revenue losses." Adds Jasmeet Singh, VP Strategic Alliances.

In 2006, Rediff added Akamai's Content Targeting service to its portfolio to provide a personalized experience to its visitors. Content Targeting uses details of a user location to enable Rediff to deliver content based on the geographical location of the end user.

The Akamai-Rediff relationship continues to grow with Akamai now helping to offload application infrastructure using technologies such as Edge Side Includes (ESI); a standard simple markup language used to define Web page components for dynamic assembly and delivery of Web applications at the edge of the Internet.

Malovika Rao
malovkar@cybermedia.co.in