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Akamai availability-protection service keeps eyes glued to Victoria's Secret site

By Jennifer Mears
Network World, 12/10/01

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - Victoria's Secret can't afford to have its brand name tarnished by downtime on its Web site. For that reason, the lingerie retailer is taking advantage of new services from Akamai that the vendor claims will virtually guarantee every customer can access the site at any time.

The managed service that Akamai announces this week, EdgeSuite for Business Continuity, is designed to protect a site's infrastructure and keep the site available 100% of the time.

The services include:

Site failover, which automatically redirects URL requests to a copy of the site stored on an Akamai server if the origin server goes down;

Site shield, which protects the origin server from attack by letting it communicate only with a certain set of Akamai servers that only accept requests from the Akamai network, making the origin server inaccessible from the Internet;

Enhanced DNS, which distributes DNS servers across multiple networks;

Secure content delivery, which enables a secure delivery between the end user and the origin server.

The offerings enhance Akamai's EdgeSuite service, which lets companies deliver entire Web sites, including dynamic content, from thousands of Akamai caching servers at the edge of the Internet.

Victoria's Secret has been using the Akamai content-delivery service for 18 months. In preparing for the online response to its TV broadcast of a fashion show on November 15, the company found it could save time and money by using Akamai's EdgeSuite Failover service.

Tim Plzak, director of advanced technology for Limited Technology Services, which manages the Victoria's Secret Web site, says he can now quickly prepare for spikes in traffic.

In the past, Plzak says, it would have taken four to six months to install hardware and create a global load-balancing network that intelligently routed content to the most available servers. By using the Akamai service, he cut his preparation time to four to six weeks and has a more reliable setup, he says.

Pricing for EdgeSuite starts at $20,000 per month. The services are sold as add-ons and cost between $5,000 and $18,000 per month.

Contact Senior Writer Jennifer Mears