AOL Cache

[Nick Arnett]

At 12:26 PM 4/16/98 -0700, Michael Sauers wrote:
>...  But, isn't what AOL is
>doing, i.e. caching on a much grander scale and not just on an individuals
>machine, a little different than what has been going on all along?

Only in the sense that Inktomi has developed a new approach to scalability,
allowing a server such as this one to scale by adding more computers (v.
expanding a single box) and by scaling up to sizes that are thought to be
impractical using previous approaches.  Inktomi is all about scalability --
it came out of research at Berkeley on how large numbers of inexpensive
computers could be used in place of one big, expensive one.  It's the RAID
metaphor applied to processing.

There may be some qualitative improvements, but it's still just a caching
proxy server.  The significant difference is quantitative.

Nick Arnett
--

Phone/fax: (408) 733-7613  E-mail: narnett at mccmedia.com