As Effects of Taiwan Earthquake Continue to Disrupt Internet Communications, Companies Find Business Continuity with Akamai.Asian-based businesses and multi-national brands alike reap benefit of Akamai's globally distributed platform for ensuring online performance and minimizing data loss CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- It has been over one month since an earthquake off Taiwan dramatically impacted Internet connectivity by severing sev·er v. sev·ered, sev·er·ing, sev·ers v.tr. 1. To set or keep apart; divide or separate. 2. To cut off (a part) from a whole. 3. undersea telecommunications cables, but businesses leveraging Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. , Inc. (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on : AKAM AKAM Akamai Technologies, Inc. (stock abbreviation) AKAM Automated Key Access Machine ) for Web content and applications delivery into Asia continue to experience strong online performance and uptime of operations. For additional information on Akamai's services for ensuring availability of a business' online operations, please go to www.akamai.com/availability. "The impact of the recent earthquake near Taiwan is a prime example of the often over-looked vulnerabilities with today's Internet infrastructure," said Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai. "Akamai's global platform intelligently routes around bottlenecks on the Internet, finding the optimal path for content to always reach end users. As a result, we are enabling businesses to ensure availability in the wake of widespread events such as this recent earthquake, and during smaller-scale, but far more pervasive events that happen on a daily basis." For example, during the initial week following the earthquake, tests1 show that Web transactions handled by online businesses not leveraging Akamai were either unavailable, or took as long as 1-2 minutes to complete. Conversely, Web transactions delivered by Akamai peaked to an average of 4-5 seconds to complete immediately following the earthquake, before returning to pre-quake levels of an average of 2 seconds. "The Manpower brand is intrinsically tied to the customer experience, which requires top performance and continual uptime for all of our clients as they leverage our employment services," said Joe Luedtke, Director Global Technology Services at Manpower. "In the days and weeks following the earthquake near Taiwan, Akamai was critical in enabling Manpower's online services to remain high performing for our users within Asia. Our Akamai-enabled systems experienced no disruption in service or performance." In China specifically, where business' online operations have been hardest hit by the effects of the earthquake, Akamai customers have experienced near 100 percent availability for Web transactions delivered via the Akamai platform versus an average of 40 percent availability for transactions delivered from a company's origin infrastructure.1 Akamai operates in close partnership with nationally-licensed service providers in China to comply with local requirements. These partnerships allow customers of Akamai continue to receive consistent high performance from locations within and around China. Akamai's Web Application Accelerator and Dynamic Site Accelerator services are designed to leverage Akamai's globally-deployed platform to deliver consistent, improved application performance for users worldwide. Akamai accelerates customers' dynamic Web transactions using a number of techniques, many of which are unique to Akamai. For example: * Dynamic mapping of user requests to an optimal Akamai edge server allows Akamai to respond in real time to changing Internet conditions, alleviating the impact of network problems and improving availability of customer applications. * Route optimization technology enables Akamai to avoid Internet problem spots, sending application transactions over Internet paths that are fast and reliable. * Connection optimization technology incorporates a number of capabilities, including compression, long-lived inter-server connections, content pre-fetching, and transport protocol optimization. "As enterprises move business processes online for cost and time efficiencies, the risks of downtime caused by planned and unplanned maintenance, physical disasters, distributed denial of service A condition in which a system can no longer respond to normal requests. See denial of service attack. (DDoS) attacks, viruses, and unpredictable flash crowds are many," continued Leighton. "The availability of an enterprise's Web operations Web operations is a domain of expertise within IT systems management that involves the deployment, operation, maintenance, tuning, and repair of web-based applications. With the rise of web technologies since mid-1995, specialists have emerged that understand the complexities of is vital to building and maintaining its brand equity and customer loyalty, ensuring communications with customers and partners, and ultimately generating revenue. The inherent nature of Akamai's massively distributed global network provides a shock absorbing effect to protect a company's centralized cen·tral·ize v. cen·tral·ized, cen·tral·iz·ing, cen·tral·iz·es v.tr. 1. To draw into or toward a center; consolidate. 2. infrastructure and preserve high availability Also called "RAS" (reliability, availability, serviceability) or "fault resilient," it refers to a multiprocessing system that can quickly recover from a failure. There may be a minute or two of downtime while one system switches over to another, but processing will continue. ." In addition to the following information, Akamai will be making available raw measurement data (in an anonymous format) from relevant areas of its deployed network for the timeframe during and following the earthquake. This data will be available for research purposes on Akamai's public website at www.akamai.com/availability. EDITORS NOTE: 1) The standard VoIP encoding "requires packet loss far less than 1 percent to avoid audible errors. Ideally, there should be no packet loss for VoIP. "Source: Quality of Service for Voice over IP, Cisco, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk698/technologies_white_paper 09186a00800d6b73.shtml (Due to the length of this URL URL in full Uniform Resource Locator Address of a resource on the Internet. The resource can be any type of file stored on a server, such as a Web page, a text file, a graphics file, or an application program. , it may be necessary to copy and paste To copy files from one location to another or to copy text and images from one document to another. All modern operating systems and applications have a copy and paste capability that is typically selected from an Edit menu. See cut and paste and Win Copy between windows. it into your Internet browser's URL address field) 2) At 3 percent packet loss, downloading a Web page may appear to be 30 - 100 percent slower for some users. Source: Client Perceived Response Time and Its Relationship to Different Link and Page Characteristics, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Corporation, http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/agrawal/talks/URTExperiments.pdf 3) Above 10-12 percent packet loss, connections start to get broken, and video conferencing See videoconferencing. (communications) video conferencing - A discussion between two or more groups of people who are in different places but can see and hear each other using electronic communications. is unusable. Source: Tutorial on Internet Monitoring Analyzing traffic on the Internet. Monitoring is performed to determine packet volume for network configuration as well as to find out how employees are spending their time on the Internet. This is the first step in determining whether or not filtering should be added to the network. & PingER ping·er n. A device used underwater to produce pulses of sound, as for an echo sounder. pinger Noun a device that makes a pinging sound, esp. a timer Noun 1. at SLAC SLAC Stanford Linear Accelerator Center SLAC Student Labor Action Coalition SLAC Scapholunate Advanced Collapse (wrist disorder) SLAC Salt Lake Acting Company (Utah) SLAC Student Learning Assistance Center http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html About Akamai Akamai[R] is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai, improving their revenue and reducing costs by maximizing the performance of their online businesses. Leveraging the Akamai EdgePlatform, these organizations gain business advantage today, and have the foundation for the emerging Web solutions of tomorrow. Akamai is "The Trusted Choice for Online Business." For more information, visit www.akamai.com. 1 (Testing is based on the results of 3rd party measurement companies) |
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