Re: Cisco Cache Director (Was RE: Does Squid beat the rest? )

paul@vix.com said:
} wierd. i guess i just don't know how to market things. here i've
} been selling transparent caching to real customers since february and
} nobody knows about it, whereas cisco hasn't sold it to anybody but
} everybody knows about it. we're in beta testing for V2.0 of our
} product, a total rewrite of our V1.0, whereas cisco's stuff has yet to
} be fired in anger, yet there've been a dozen messages about their
} stuff lately and never a single message about my stuff.

You probably didn't spend enough time going to be people and saying "we
have this great idea.... and you mustn't tell anyone about it" - that
second bit makes sure *everyone* knows really quickly!

} anyway, my distributor is http://www.mirror-image.com/ if anybody
} would like to see a real, commercial strength, supported transparent
} proxy that's been serving real users in earlier incarnations for seven
} months. oh, and unlike cisco's soon to be available product, we DO
} support ICP.

We have seen this and are impressed by the concept. We're also impressed
by the way that mirror image are working on getting content providers
cache friendly and the great big Terabyte cache boxes. I like the fact
that ICP is supported, I'd be even happier if the cache protocol they use
was open as well (I believe its not... but I haven't really dug here).

What worries me is that we need to put an Interceptor (their name) between
our access routers and the rest of the world. We asked about reliability
and were told that they don't fail in practice, and if they do they fail
open (ie they still route even if they don't cache). Unfortunately our
evaluation box failed far more dramatically and frequently. Now I don't
want to throw mud at Mirror Image (one box can always go wrong - although
I am *very* unhappy about the failure mode in our case), but I am
concerned that they end up in the router marked, and thats not what they
are about. With Cisco I am concerned that they are jumping into the cache
market, and thats not what they have previously done well.

What I want is the ability for the router people (Cisco for us) to be able
to shunt particular requests into some other system, and the people with
the great caching ideas to be able to take those redirected requests.

However everyone always wants to own all the territory.... and this may
not be good for us at the sharp end.

        Nigel.

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[ Nigel.Metheringham@theplanet.net   -  Systems Software Engineer ]
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