A new caching solution created for speeding up content delivery was launched at DEMO 2001 in Phoenix, Ariz. Monday.
Billed as the go-to product in FineGround Networks Inc.’s fledgling arsenal,
FineGround Condenser is the end result of a new technology that enables
content and service providers cut down on costs while granting clients
extremely fast content delivery.
Dubbed Condensation technology, FineGround’s intent is not to replace Web
caching, but to complement it. True to its name, the product works by
miniaturizing dynamic content in real-time. For instance, dynamically
generated Web pages that are visited regularly by a user or a group of users
typically change only by a few percent between successive visits.
FineGround Condenser transmits only the changes in the page between
successive visits, which eliminates extra network traffic. This often
results in bandwidth savings of up to 95 percent and accordingly, an
improvement in the end users’ online experience.
The software is installed at the content provider between the content server
and the Internet. It is also self-sufficient: condenser automatically
minimizes content without requiring any changes to the content, content
server, or end users’ Web browsers.
What makes Condenser important?
Nat Kausik, chief executive officer and president of FineGround Networks,
acknowledged that although the Internet generally provides a sufficient
platform for the intelligent delivery of static content, it lacks the
network intelligence required to handle dynamically generated content such
as e-business transactions, news and stock quotes that are continuously
updated on a Web site.
“Our mission is to deliver scalable content acceleration solutions that not
only impact the quality of service delivered to end-users, but also reduce
bandwidth costs by an order of magnitude for our customers,” Kausik said.
FineGround’s contention is that users will pay the $50,000 (base price) for
the Condenser to scale back bandwidth costs. Targeted to embracers of the
open-source movement, the product is currently available on Linux platforms.
With Monday’s news, FineGround became the latest content delivery firm to
tantalize the industry with a new offering.
A couple of weeks ago, Novell quietly morphed its caching engine division
into a what it hopes will be an all-purpose content delivery platform,
called Volera Inc. The outfit is co-backed by Accenture and Nortel Networks.
On Monday, Volera lifted the secretive veil from its new products,
the purpose of which sounds very much like Condenser’s goals: Volvera aims
to combine caching and content management services to create a creating a
platform that speeds content delivery.
Volera, like FineGround, acknowledged that the Internet is sufficiently
suited for low-bandwidth purposes, but that it must be improved if more
advanced technologies — streaming media, decentralized Web sites, or
broadcast events — are to thrive.
Those in the CDN space who listen to Volera’s investment bank Morgan
Stanley/Dean Witter have reason to be encouraged: the bank estimates the
market for content networking, which includes caching, content distribution
services and switching infrastructure, will reach $22 billion by 2004.
