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| 2. INTERNET APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS Modern enterprise applications and services on the Internet require rigorous end-to-end system quality, as even small degradations in performance and reliability can have a considerable business impact. A single one-hour outage can cost a large e-commerce site hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in lost revenue, for example In addition, outages can cause significant damage to brand reputation. The cost of enterprise application downtime is comparable, and maybe measured in terms of both lost revenue and reduced productivity. Application performance is also directly tied to key business metrics such as application adoption and site conversion rates. A 2009 Forrester Consulting survey found that a majority of online shoppers cited website performance as an important factor in their online store loyalty, and that 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds fora page to load before abandoning a site [19]. We can find a more concrete quantification of this effect in an Akamai study on an e-commerce website [11]. In the study, site visitors were partitioned half were directed to the site through Akamai (providing a high-performance experience) while the other half were sent directly to the sites origin servers. Analysis showed that the users on the high-performance site were 15% 1 For instance, a one-hour outage could cost one well-known, large online retailer $2.8 million in sales, based on 2009 revenue numbers. more likely to complete a purchase and 9% less likely to abandon the site after viewing just one page. For BB applications, the story is similar. Ina IDC survey, customers using Akamai‘s enterprise application acceleration services reported annual revenue increases of $200,000 to over $3 million directly attributable to the improved performance and reliability of their applications [20]. Unfortunately, inherent limitations in the Internets architecture make it difficult to achieve desired levels of performance natively on the Internet. Designed as a best-effort network, the Internet provides no guarantees on end-to-end reliability or performance. On the contrary, wide-area Internet communications are subject to a number of bottlenecks that adversely impact performance, including latency, packet loss, network outages, inefficient protocols, and inter-network friction. In addition, there are serious questions as to whether the Internet can scale to accommodate the demands of online video. Even short term projections show required capacity levels that are an order of magnitude greater than what we see on the Internet today. Distributing HD-quality programming to a global audience requires tens of petabits per second of capacity—an increase of several orders of magnitude. Bridging the technological gap between the limited capabilities of the Internets infrastructure and the performance requirements of current and future distributed applications is thus critical to the continued growth and success of the Internet and its viability for business. We now take a closer look at why this is so challenging. Download 493.43 Kb. Share with your friends:
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