Rackspace Speeds Cloud
Rackspace Hosting hopes to rack up more customers with faster cloud servers provided by the speed gained through Akamai.
Akamai is one of the pioneers in Web caching. Akamai servers (it has nearly 80,000 of the darn things) cache frequently used data. Because the servers are closer to the customers access is faster.
High volume commercial Web sites were the first to turn to Akamai. Now with Rackspace, that same acceleration technology can be given to corporate apps. Rackspace will begin integrating Akamai into its services in the second quarter.
In some ways Rackspace is playing catch-up to Amazon's home grown content delivery network named CloudFront.
Akamai has an interesting history, having been founded by MIT professor and graduate student Daniel L. Lewin. Lewin, who served as CTO, was on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, heading to Los Angeles on 9/11. The plane was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center.
Lewin got military training in Israel and reportedly tried to thwart the hijacking. Unfortunately Lewin was wildly outnumbered, had no weapon and was killed by the hijackers. That's a hero.
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/18/2011 at 12:47 PM