Internap Takes Accelerated IP Internet Traffic Accelerator Service Global

A year ago, Internap Network Services announced its Accelerated IP Internet traffic accelerator service (XIP), which the company claimed could improve performance of enterprise Web applications by up to 400 percent by eliminating some of the belt-and-suspenders reliability protection provided by TCP. The company is now announcing that the service is available worldwide, after having been tested in several cities during the past year.

XIP requires no additional hardware or client-side software. In addition, Internap is offering some minor enhancements to usability, the customer portal and reporting over what was offered a year ago, but no major technological changes.

The service has meant that U.S. and European customers of Concurrent, which provides media data collection assimilation and reporting, can receive the gigabytes of data they need to get daily in the timeframe that they require, says Rodolphe Kirk, director of global media data logistics for the Duluth, Ga., company. The XIP technology improves the customer experience of their users to the extent that performance is as though they were in the same building, he says. Competing products were more expensive and required more capital investment costs, especially with the bandwidth required, he adds.

"We've actually had customers calling us saying, 'Everything got a lot faster. What did you do?'" says Mark Pace, chief technical officer for Jolokia, a Scotts Valley, Calif., service provider. His 200 customers--mostly small to midsize businesses that want to provide their products to their customers as a service--require real-time data that couldn't be accelerated with methods such as multiple data centers because the replication would take too much time, he says.

His West Coast users saw a 10 percent performance increase, North American users saw a 50 percent increase, European users saw an 80 percent increase, and users in more remote areas such as South Africa and South America saw performance increases of up to 140 percent.Joe Skorupa, research VP for Data Center Transformation and Security Data Center at Gartner, says the announcement was a good move on Internap's part because a broader geographic footprint would allow the company to provide greater value to globally dispersed organizations and their business partners. The service is available now for a monthly charge ranging from $300 to $5,000.

Previously, the service had been available only in the company's Seattle, Atlanta, London and San Jose markets (since last July), says Amar Khan, VP of the IP services business for the Atlanta company, which has about 2,000 customers. While there are other TCP acceleration products on the market, they are largely hardware-based and intended for point-to-point use, he says.

The company claims to be the only one that provides the acceleration as a service, which it offers by maintaining a consistently large data transmission "window" size for both the sender and the recipient throughout packet delivery, rather than the small window size with gradual increase in size as warranted by performance that is typically offered by TCP.

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