Akamai is one of the world’s leading ( ). Their official corporate name is Akamai Technologies and it is for good reason. This Cambridge Massachusetts based internet technology firm brings in around $254 billion in operating income and retains around $1 billion in revenue. Akamai is and has for some time been the leader in the CDN space. (Photo Credit: )
For those of you who do not know what a CDN is or want a refresher, it s a company that helps speed up the internet by saving copies ( also known as caching ) of websites, photos, videos, and more on thousands of servers all over the world that are very close to you so they download faster. So basically a person in China only has to wait for a file to download from a server super close to them versus them having to download a file from say a Los Angeles data center or something similar.
Currently they have many large corporate partners and one includes who resells Akamai’s service at a pay as you go for small website owners who want the power of the enterprise at a startup budget level.
Akamai also offers other enterprise services based on their global internet prescence such as speeding up and improving the experience of inter office communication. They are the best because they have so many peering partnerships ( they can send traffic through other big internet players ) and so many P.O.P.’s ( points of presence essentially meaning places they have put their servers and own some the lines connecting different data centers around the world sending traffic through them );
A google search of how many servers does akamai have returns:
http://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-does-Akamai-have
which points out that they run about 83,00 according to an article on the New York times at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/technology/17static.html
Global Good that has to do with large computer networks:
Pretty cool eh? Man the Global Good things we could do with 83,000 servers! Personally, we want to help support those scientific, research, and technology ( and everybody else I may have forgotten that is Global Good~ ) organizations. Most particularly the firms who have hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world who donate a percentage of their computers speed away while running or when they are not using it to help perform complex operations and do science research for causes such as curing Cancer, curing Aids, curing all sort of other things that people suffer with in this world that we can hopefully help stop. It is very interesting how much computing power is out there now even in the hands of little kids with powerful iPhones that just sits idle and not being dedicated to helping the worlds problems. If everybodies phones and computers could help do all sorts of computer research to form an even larger computer network we could compute some of the world’s problems faster.
Their are free, as in free beer, programs which lets you split up work among major clusters of servers such has Hadoop and great services like which let you rent only the servers you need for as many hours as you need. The only problem comes when you want to take on these huge scientific and research questions you need to buy soooooo many servers it becomes cost prohibitive without the right investment. …So a lot of the world’s problems only get solved by a small percentage of the people who could fix them because the right people are not always in the right spot and organizations make compromises sometimes when they are not matched up in their discovery phases serving. …And here at Global Good Group we want to make sure the Right people get the Right information and hopefully can use that in their own Global Good way to truly help the world.
Also companies like Akamai who speed up the internet with their server networks ( CDN ) are responsible for allowing the world to watch major world wide events like Tsunami news, Presidential Debates, Olympics and more all live over streaming to high quality across the world. What’s more is that all of the users are simultaneously connecting which means many of these CDN firms are really setup to handle almost any type of spike that even hackers can send.
Even Akamai recovered very fast after receiving one of the world’s biggest attacks. The attack was known as DDOS or distributed denial of service which means the bad buys use a network of servers to spam illegitimate traffic to the victim organizations servers which then cannot tell what is real and fake and essentially shuts down or stops accepting traffic and a website or media for example will appear down. This is very costly whether in the private or public enterprise, government, or organization such as the Red Cross where when servers go down or information cannot be access it can have devastating results. We are all in here to supporting the world becoming more secure and protecting the world’s information as well. In fact check out one of our old articles
Some of their competitors include:
LimeLight Networks ( One of their top competitors in CDN)
Level 3 Communications Wikipedia – Another pretty major competitor
Level 3 Communications Website: http://www.level3.com/
Internap:
Internap is also resold through:
Related Information and Resources:
Official Content Delivery Network Wikipedia
Background and Financial Information Source:
Related News: “LeveL 3 and Akamai – The Investment Paradox” on
Talk on the net:
http://www.mackb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/mac/28170/What-is-Akamai