Akamai, the service provider whose optimization techniques are collocated with major Web content providers worldwide, is moving to the data center.

"Another way to optimize your WAN is to take traffic off the WAN and substitute the Internet," says Akamai senior product marketing manager Neil Cohen. In Akamai's case, "the Internet" means the Web accessed via Akamai's hosts, which are equipped with a range of optimization capabilities, including ones acquired with Akamai's purchase of Netli in February 2007.

Enterprises with any IP-based application can gain up to 5 times current performance for wireline and wireless users by tapping Akamai's service, the vendor claims.

It works like this: A customer wakes up one morning, determined to bypass any talk of WAN optimization hardware and instead to improve IP application performance by switching to Akamai's service. IT installs a pair of plain-vanilla x86 servers equipped with Akamai's Linux-based software into the data center and changes the hostname DNS for all end users to the Akamai address.

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— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch