CacheLogic servers target p-to-p traffic

CacheLogic, a small startup based in Cambridge, England, next week will introduce a line of servers designed specifically to reduce the growing workload being generated over the Internet by file-swapping networks such as Gnutella and FastTrack.

Aimed squarely at consumer ISPs, which CacheLogic says are now devoting as much as 70 percent of their bandwidth to this kind of peer-to-peer (p-to-p) traffic, the Cachepliance 2000 and Cachepliance 4000 are high performance servers, designed to sit on the edge of an ISP’s network where they cache and relay p-to-p traffic in a more efficient manner than Gnutella and FastTrack applications typically employ.

Gnutella and FastTrack are the p-to-p networks used by most popular file-sharing applications, including Kazaa, Morpheus, and Limewire.

The decentralized nature of these networks can make them a nightmare for network managers, said CacheLogic Chief Technology Officer Andrew Parker. When a Gnutella client, for example, swaps a file, it doesn’t take into account whether its peer is in the same county or the same continent, he said. The end result is that p-to-p traffic often travels a greater distance on the network than it really needs to. “The bandwidth usage is pretty high,” he added.

The Cachepliance “sits on the border between the ISP network and the Internet and effectively restructures the [p-to-p] network to make it more sympathetic to the underlying physical network,” he said.

“It’s basically a heck of a lot of storage with some routing functionality,” said IDC analyst Max Flisi, adding that vendors are only just now starting to come out with these kinds of servers.

The Cachepliance 2000 ships with 700GB of SCSI storage. The Cachepliance 4000 contains 1.45TB.

One ISP that is evaluating CacheLogic products is Britain’s Telewest Communications, which will begin testing the Cachepliance in a lab trial over the next few months.

With about half the bandwidth on Telewest’s network being consumed by p-to-p applications, the company is searching for ways to reduce the traffic, said Telewest Internet Technical Consultant Fergal Butler.

The fact that the Cachepliance actually caches p-to-p files makes it different from other offerings, such as Sandvine’s PPE 8200, said Butler, but the fact that ISPs would be caching music or video files on their own equipment also raises some legal questions.

“I guess we’re concerned about the legality in the United Kingdom of these potential solutions,” he said.

Butler said that his team would be consulting Telewest’s legal department, and that, if given the green light, he hoped to eventually try the Cachepliance on the company’s live network.

IDC’s Max Flisi says that he doubts the legal questions will stop the Cachepliance from being used. “I don’t think they’ll run into that kind of a problem,” said Flisi. “They’re not really endorsing p-to-p traffic.”

Both Cachepliance machines, which are available immediately, run dual Xeon processors, with 2GB of memory and a custom Linux distribution with a “heavily modified” Linux 2.4 kernel, said Parker. The Cachepliance 2000 is designed to support 30,000 users, and costs £30,000 ($49,092). The Cachepliance 4000 costs £50,000 and is designed for 50,000 users. Support for either system costs £10,000 per year, he said.