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Intel focus on high-growth Net areas

C.J. Punnathara

KOCHI, Sept. 6

`SERVER down' and `server busy' are intemperate messages flashed into the minds of Indian Internet users all too often.

The explosive growth in the number of Internet users and high volume of business transacted on the Net has resulted in inadequate infrastructure, low bandwidth and poor Internet technology.

The solutions are equally simple and accessible: Increase the number of servers, add bandwidth and access superior technology.

But the installation and extension of additional servers and equipment ``represent significant costs and not one that decreases with time'' Intel, the world's leading chip maker, has said.

At a workshop organised in Kochi, Intel said that it is chipping in with building blocks to accelerate, optimise and ensure better security for e-business portals while offering greater safety to millions of financial transactions undertaken on the Web.

From being the world's foremost chip producer, Intel is transforming into an integrated infrastructure provider for the Net.

Like in the rest of the world, in India also, additional infrastructure is required to meet peak traffic demands, burst traffic requirements and mission-critical traffic as against non-mission critical traffic.

There are certain times of the day when traffic on the Net is at its peak, while infrastructure remains grossly under utilised at other times.

Burst traffic occurs for short bursts during peak time for a specific site, such as when the Union Budget is presented in Parliament.

Segregation between revenue earning commercial traffic and non commercial Net-browsing traffic is essential pre-requisite to provide increased access and bandwidth to mission critical traffic.

The solution often does not lie in increasing the number of servers. The moment an additional server which has been installed breaks down, the `server down' message will reappear on the screens of users.

Routers and switches will continue sending messages to the faulty server which will relay the server down message back to the user.

Today, an average American purchaser gets impatient with an unresponsive query after eight seconds. Tomorrow, that time frame could narrow down to four seconds.

To prevent the server down message from appearing, it is essential to optimise the existing infrastructure by creating intelligent networks where the traffic is re-routed to functioning servers.

This is possible through transactional and load balancing systems. Intel offers a family of load balancing solutions that have been designed to deliver additional server availability in secure applications.

While efficiency has become the catchword for both the service provider and the Internet user, security and reliability have become paramount for e-business.

In order to provide reliability, load balancing solutions often make multiple servers look like a single high-powered network resource to those accessing the site.

Bandwidth and application shaping solutions enable service providers to manage traffic. The Intel Netstructure 7340 traffic shaper allocates wide area network (WAN) bandwidth to business-critical applications while limiting those to non-critical or bandw idth intensive applications.

It does this by detecting and segregating network traffic, analysing its behavior and providing network reports. It facilitates sticky server solutions whereby the orders of a customer are not repeated and feedback is concise and precise.

Netstructure selectively forwards connections to the many servers arrayed behind it in an equitable manner, according to the servers operational health and the nature of the query.

With the fervent spread of e-business, traffic on secure routes like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) has surged manifold. SSL is a method for encrypting Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic developed by Netscape in 1994.

Web sites using SSL tripled during between 1998 and 1999 from 15,000 sites to over 52,000 sites. Furthermore, another 1,000,000 sites are currently testing SSL. This surge has increased the traffic in SSL manifold.

SSL communication slows down when servers themselves undertake the task of decryption. To counter this, companies such as Intel has come forward with SSL accelerators which does the decryption much more faster and efficiently.

This is a lot more viable than adding more servers to the server farm of a company.

The company is also providing Virtual Private Network (VPN), which acts like a dedicated channel to a company, offering security and secrecy. In the US, the Navy, Army and the Airforce use VPN for their encrypted communications.

The need for speed and security on the Net is accompanied by rapid technological transformation and even faster redundancy in technologies.

This means that communication systems and networks must be capable of adapting quickly and easily to change. With the huge costs involved, business cant afford to replace entire networks or add larger proprietary servers every time they want to offer a n ew feature or service on the Internet.

Addressing these problems, Intel has created the Communications Products Group (CPG) to ensure that massive volumes of Internet transactions will be processed in a fast, reliable and secure manner for emerging e-business data centres.

This was sought to be accomplished through integration of voice and data communication at the `edge of the Internet'. Traffic management, cache appliances, high density servers, bandwidth management, VPN gateway, e-commerce accelerator, data centre switc hes and management services are all emerging as high growth potential areas on the Net.

Intel plans to provide the backbone by offering critical inputs which will balance and accelerate the traffic in a totally secure environment.