Mirror Image looking to push apps

WOBURN, MASS. - As content delivery networks evolve to handle more than just static content, the latest service provider to move in a more sophisticated direction is Mirror Image Internet, which is latching on to the Web services bandwagon.

The content delivery company recently announced plans to enhance its network of content access points (CAP) to support content and applications. It's doing so by supporting Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition within its CAP servers. This will let customers or Mirror Image centrally manage Web-based applications, and establish support for Web services standards such as XML, Simple Object Access Protocol, Web Services Delivery Language and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration.

"We're driving hard now to push into the next world that's moving beyond display elements into application delivery," says Bob Hammond, a senior vice president at Mirror Image. "We're going to the application layer and starting to provide services so that applications can talk with applications on the Internet."

However, the question is whether Mirror Image customers will take to the idea. Sean Armstrong, senior Internet manager at Network Intelligence, formerly OpenSystems, is intrigued by the prospect of using Mirror Image to deliver applications. The network intelligence software maker uses Mirror Image to deliver its software downloads.

"It would leverage the size and speed of Mirror Image's infrastructure to alleviate the load balancing and single point of failure concerns I have with our current Web infrastructure," he says.

But until the standards for Web services become better defined, Armstrong says he won't invest the time and resources in writing applications designed for the Web.

"I am holding off until all of the details are hashed out, the language is available for me to learn and it has been proven bulletproof," he says. "A Webmaster releasing control of the Web server to an outside service is a big leap of faith and one that I'm not ready for yet."

Still, analysts predict that as Web services gain better footing of content delivery networks - originally designed to speed the delivery of static images in Web sites - they will play a crucial role in how businesses move applications over the Web. Akamai Technologies, for example, recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to develop support for Microsoft's .Net platform so that Web services can be deployed from Akamai's network of caching servers at the edge of the Internet.

However at this point most analysts agree that there is more hype than substance behind the concept of Web services, which basically consist of application components that can interact with each other on the fly.

Uncertainty also exists about which Web services will lend themselves to delivery over a CDN.

"The question remains: Which applications are suited to be distributed or delivered through an overlay network of CDN devices," says Greg Howard, principal analyst at High Tech Resource Consulting Group.

For its part, Mirror Image is targeting its new services to companies in the financial, media, retail, manufacturing and travel industries. In addition, the new Web Services Delivery Gateway appliance that provides centralized management of applications will enable businesses to handle some of the sticky issues surrounding Web services such as security, monitoring and billing, Hammond says.

Moreover, the new, enhanced services make it possible for companies to develop and host Web-based applications with Mirror Image, reducing infrastructure and staffing demands internally, Hammond says.

Mirror Image executives say their network is well-suited to support application delivery because of its architecture, which differs from competitors' such as Akamai Technologies' and Speedera Networks'. Akamai and Speedera have installed thousands of edge servers on hundreds of public networks around the world.

On the other hand, Mirror Image has fewer than two dozen CAPs in the U.S., Europe and Asia. These CAPs include servers, routers, databases and other hardware and software, which Mirror Image executives say give customers more processing power at the edge.

"Rather than delivering static content as has been the core of content distribution, now we'll have a situation where you're actually going to be storing executables out at the edge of the network," says Scott Bishop, marketing director at Mirror Image. "We've prided ourselves on our gargantuan CAPs at the aggregation points [of the Internet] that include a lot of computer power and storage."

Howard agrees that the Mirror Image architecture is well designed to support applications, "but the question remains what are those applications going to be and where are the customers?"