Cisco: CDNs enable e-services
 
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SAN JOSE - As enterprises move more business processes to their networks, they will need content networking technology to enable their infrastructures to shoulder the growing load.
That's according to Jim Ricotta, general manager of the content networking business unit for Cisco, who addressed attendees at the CDN Fall Event 2001 here Wednesday. Ricotta focused on how Cisco gear can help businesses get more out of the infrastructure they have, offering up a real world example -- Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services -- which says it has cut its up-front server costs by more than 80% and improved its network availability by nearly 10% since installing Cisco content networking devices.
"What we've seen over the last couple of years is e-business services have gone beyond the basic place-orders-on-the-Web. They're now starting to touch every function of the company," Ricotta says, referring to applications such as e-learning and customer relationship management that are drawing a growing number of internal and external users to an enterprise's network.
"The worst thing you can do is roll out an application that now lets your customers interact with you in the network and then have it fail under load. That's one of the worst scenarios. And that's one of the issues that content networking helps address," he says.
Unacceptable network performance was one of the reasons Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services began looking at content networking vendors earlier this year. The division of Siemens is a healthcare network that delivers applications, professional services and outsourcing to more than 5,000 healthcare organizations in 20 countries. It hosts health applications for more than 1,000 health providers and its network handles more than 107 million transactions daily, says Michael Alban, strategic alliance manager at Siemens Medical.
Earlier this year, Siemens Medical took a mainframe application that had been delivered with a green-screen interface and made it browser-based. Siemens' clients were happy, Alban says, but his network managers weren't. The application used a two-megabit Java applet to run the browser, and each time an update was needed that applet had to download, putting great stress on the Siemens network.
The application was running on 18 servers, at a cost of about $900,000 each, to serve 50 customers.
"We needed a way around this," Alban says. "It was just not the way to deliver this application."
As a result, Siemens Medical looked at a variety of content networking hardware and software vendors and finally settled on Cisco. Siemens Medical didn't consider content networking service providers such as Akamai or Speedera, Alban says, because most of his customers access Siemens' network via a private line, and those providers cache content in public networks.
Siemens Medical already uses Cisco gear and so it was an easy fit, Alban says. In less than six months, Cisco and Siemens installed two 1100 Series content switches next to Siemens Web servers and in front of its database and application servers. A Cisco Content Engine, which caches content, was installed at each customer data center.
That way, Siemens Medical can deliver the necessary content once and the hundreds of users at each customer site can retrieve the data from the Cisco cache, rather than putting stress on Siemens' internal servers, Alban says.
The setup has reduced the necessary infrastructure from 18 servers for the 50 customers to just three. In addition, network availability was increased 9.98%, Alban says.
Because of the success, Siemens Medical plans to route more applications through the content networking technology.
"Content networking is critical to our deployment of Web-based applications," Alban says.
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