The explosive growth of the Internet has been driven by the enormous benefits provided by easy and timely access to e-commerce, information and entertainment. However, the Internet was never designed to deal with this enormous surge in traffic. Delays in accessing information on the web, web site outages and web site scalability issues have rapidly become serious problems for companies that rely on the Internet to do business.

Integrated Delivery Network (IDN)

Multiple vendors targeting different product segments have met customer demands for content delivery, streaming, global load balancing and other services. Customers have to perform the difficult task of integrating these different point solutions and maintaining them. An IDN is a revolutionary, full-service solution for the delivery of all types of content including static, dynamic, secure and streaming.

The key components of an IDN include the following:

• Traffic management system

• Global network of caching and streaming servers

• Logging and reporting

The Universal Delivery Network

The Traffic Management System

The core foundation of an Integrated Delivery Network Service is—the global traffic management system, which provides the ability to evaluate end-user locations and their relation to servers deployed across multiple POPs. The decision criteria typically include (but are not limited to) server load, packet loss, network latency, application availability and bandwidth cost factors.

The Traffic Management System is comprised of Traffic Directors (DNS system) and Data Collection Agents (probing sub-system)

• Traffic Directors (DNS system): The service-based solutions contain specialized DNS servers that use advanced mechanisms to determine which IP addresses to return for a given domain name and service. These servers work seamlessly with the Internet DNS system. The specialized DNS servers can be thought of as the traffic directors of the system and are the critical component of the global traffic management system.

• Data Collection Agents (Probing sub-system):

• The traffic management system uses hundreds of probes to collect data on network latency and server load. This data is sent periodically, in real-time, to the traffic directors. The probe tests are performed for network packet loss, round trip time, service performance and availability at the local servers. The service tests are performed using actual user sessions.

• Global Network of Caching and Streaming Servers: The other major component is the highly redundant network of caching and streaming servers, distributed across multiple backbones, for delivery of a customer’s static HTTP, FTP, streaming and SSL content. These resources increase the customer’s scale and presence on the web, by providing benefits such as faster performance, increased availability, reduced IT staff management burden and lower equipment costs.

• Logging and Reporting: Customers like to know who their users are, where they are coming from, number of hits, trend in traffic patterns, and other statistical information.

Global Traffic Management

The global traffic management technology is a platform on which multiple services can be offered.