Akamai to increase server deployment

BANGALORE:  A recent study by the US EPA (Environment Protection Agency) shows that there are more than 15 million servers deployed in the world.  These servers are spread across various departments, which means that 80 per cent of the IT infrastructure sits idle at any given point of time. Though the IT infrastructure is blamed for contributing to the carbon footprint, the same can be utilized efficiently to bring down the carbon footprint and help save money.

Kieran Taylor, senior director, Akamai Technologies, in an interview given to CIOL, explains how the cloud allows sharing of IT infrastructure and reduces carbon footprint of IT. He also talks about the Akamai's plans to increase server deployments across Indian networks. Excerpts:

What is driving Akamai to go with the Indian expansion plan during this downtime?

Kieran Taylor: The latest 'Akamai State of the Internet Report' has brought out some interesting facts about India and the Internet usage in particular. We have seen a 43 per cent growth in the number of IP addresses registered during 2008-09 compared to the previous year. So, that represents the number of citizens coming online.

However, unfortunately,  there is limited capacity as average connection speed in India is 772 Kb/sec. That ranks India 115th in the average connection speed. The US is number 17 with a connection speed of 3.9 MB/sec and South Korea tops the chart with 15 MB/ sec. The average connection speed around the world is 1.5 MB/sec.

So, it makes sense to invest in India at this right time to bridge the gap between demand and speed.

How exactly is Akamai planning the expansion?

KT: Akamai solutions are to bring the content closer to the users. Akamai has installed about 45,000 servers in 70 countries across more than 1100 networks. Our Indian business in particular has witnessed an impressive 10-fold growth since 2005.

Today, our India center handles all departments starting from marketing to research and development with 350-plus headcount. 

During 2009, we will be expanding our server deployment into different networks in India so that people get better connection speeds and more reliable connections to websites.

What is Akamai's strategy towards cloud initiatives?

KT: We at Akamai see cloud computing in three layers - infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and SaaS, and we have solutions for all these.

The infrastructure as a service is sought for simple storage services or data center services. The platform as a service, which is represented by computing services like Amazon EC 2 etc, helps companies in basic application processing on our platform to reduce the number of application servers and server license that is needed in a data center. This kind of service is more sought after by online commerce companies.

With regard to SaaS, we are seeing a great demand from SaaS companies who want 'pay- as you go' or utility-based models. A lot of companies come to Akamai for this type of solutions.

How vital is the role played by shared platforms in reducing infrastructure at data centers?

KT: What we see in data centers today is nothing but duplication of a number of application servers to handle certain crowd that comes to the website. At Web front end, enterprises are spending a lot of money on web servers, load balancers, fire walls, SSL accelerators among others.

So much has to be spent to handle that peak demand which happens occasionally. But, it is inefficient to over-provision hardware for websites. There is a better way where you can share platform with other enterprises and drastically reduce the infrastructure in a data center.

How can Akamai help companies achieve their sustainability goals?

KT: We are seeing so many enterprises over-provisioning the data centers. So there is a huge amount of power consumption and heat generation. With the advent of 'pay-as-you-go' computing services, enterprises now have a choice between overbuilding or pay-as-you-go services.

So we think the future of sustainable computing depends on a model where a platform can be shared among a number of companies and reduce the infrastructure needs. We are seeing shared platforms at all the three levels of the cloud computing stack.