caching at windmills (i mean exchange points)

Tue Nov 25 23:43:56 UTC 1997

to: ISP's at mae-west 

we submit for your valued consideration
a proposition

   http://www.nlanr.net/Caida/maewest.cache.html

(first few paragraphs of web page included below)

k and dw 
nlanr/caida
	(under we-run-commodity-infrastructure supervision 
	 from steve feldman (maewest),
	      bill woodcock (zocalo),
	  and david meyer   (UO) 
	)

--------------------------------------------------------
web caching as a viable Exchange Point Service 

      proposed business-compatible model of 
    web caching as a service provided at a NAP 

background 

NLANR has been operating a national public web caching
system for about two years, as part of a research proposal
sponsored by the National Science Foundation to architect and
deploy prototype Internet information provisioning
infrastructure. While the project has been an enormously
successful `proof-of-concept' to the Internet community,
especially internationally where it was received subjected to far
higher and faster accelerating demand than we intended,
participation in a cooperative global web caching mesh has for a
variety of reasons been slower to catch on in the United States. 

A significant barrier to the use of caching by ISPs in the United
States is the lack of a discernable pricing and business model to
support caching as a commericial Internet service, either
independently, packaged with a backbone service, or packaged
with exchange point connectivity service. NLANR's project has
allowed the development and deployment of a strong research
code platform, as well as a prototype infrastructure that has
recevied international recognition for its operationally pivotal
role in the Internet. However, partly because of the tremendous
success and resulting expectations of this `prototype'
infrastructure, NLANR has not had the budget or cycles to
pursue penetration of the U.S. commercial Internet market,
partially expecting it to catch on from its own momentum.

In 1997, NSF approved a follow-on award to use the by then
globally-entrenched NLANR caching infrastructure for
extended architectural investigation and experimentation. We
maintain a project plan timeline, status reports, and cache
status page including information on upgrades, major
configuration changes, and outages. 

More importantly, we are now in a position to move forward
with architectural models of caching that are more compatible
with commerically-provisioned commodity intrastructure, and in
which ISPs themselves will have an incentive to participate. On
1 December 1997, we are deploying a prototype web cache
service at MAE-West, specifically designed to demonstrate
the viability of a commercial model for providing web caching
service. 

purpose

The principal purpose of this peering-point-colocated Squid
cache is to provide an easily accessible (no-AUP, low
hop-count, low latency) alternative to the current
vBNS-hosted root caches. 

The secondary purpose of this cache is as a demonstration of
the feasibility of introducing self-supporting caches into the
main stream of the Internet's core. 

Having a web cache at popular Internet exchange point provides
ISPs an opportunity to leverage their presence at this strategic
position in the Internet topology. Because the exchange point is
a likely component of the paths of many web pages travelling
across the Internet, storing web pages on a web cache at this
point offers ISPs a potentially significant savings in bandwidth
and end user latency by allowing them to retrieve pages there
rather than having to go on to the original source. 