In The Middle

The Internet: A Home Run Ballpark

Even for corporate users, proxy services should be used inside the main public/private boundary of the firewall to keep home runs to a minimum on the intranet, improving performance when security is not necessarily required. With typical global presence, a corporation might want to have its home pages automatically cached across the slow, expensive WAN once before the users from that continent or country or city or site start pounding on the pages that have their latest corporate handbooks and such. Why wait for a user to request each one and have that traffic occur during peak periods, such as the morning wake-up call? Move it the night before.

Controlling such a vast array of proxy servers, however, is something vendors are only beginning to think through. Today, Microsoft or Netscape proxy servers must be managed individually, which means setting up configuration parameters for any fancy proactive functionality will require visits to every proxy server in turn. So, one might say, intelligent proxy services don't scale yet.

The Replication Offense A more active approach to keep users from hitting 'em outside the ballpark requires a realistic look at the opportunity for moving data closer to users. Bring the mountain to Mohammed--yes, stone by stone--but with the point of having a mountain built nearer the user. Proxy-service caching brings only a few chunks of the mountain. Replication brings the entire mountain.

This sounds paradoxical, but is it really? By viewing a whole site, a single user will move a great deal of data over the link. Why not do this in advance of users and once for all users? Otherwise, successive users will continue to download the same page over and again across the entire network.

From this perspective, this rock of Sisyphus sounds a lot worse than moving the mountain to Mohammed, particularly if you're the pipes provider and your bandwidth is used by people constantly downloading the same page. If you're a content provider, wouldn't you want your content available at a local store and not only after a long pilgrimage to an outlet store way outside of town? The Internet will continue to have trouble supporting home runs, so offer a more stable locally delivered copy of the published material, perhaps even for a fee.

Now, this is where Lotus Notes and its Domino Web server should start to pay dividends. Remember when PointCast single-handedly ruined corporate networks when it released its weather map downloading home run polling screen saver client? Now, PointCast is looking to push once inside the corporate firewall using Notes, and then have the screen savers pull from there. And PointCast can charge for that privilege.

More efficient publishing mechanisms are worth paying for if they can be controlle d. Notes offers that control. Push once (over slow links) and pull many (over fast links). That wor ks. Even better if the push mechanisms can be carefully scheduled and throttled to keep them from having an impact on other interactive traffic that might be traversing the same links or hops.

Web server and tool vendors are going to have to learn how to replicate to survive. Caching will not offer complete nor fully controllable proactive data movement services. Solutions like Notes' Domino will. Usenet News figured out that it is better to replicate than to depend on home runs. Even Netscape has multiple servers distributed across the United States and abroad from which one can download new code. Why isn't this important with Web pages?

We'll see more options for geographic dispersion or localization of content in the future. Otherwise, we're in for another home run derby on the Internet/intranet. And you thought the Web was just about hits.

Bruce Robertson is a program director with the META Group's Global Networking Strategies service. He can be reached at BruceR@metagroup.com.