Akamai’s New Terra Alta Addresses Evolving Complexities of Enterprise Application Delivery

Solution designed for changing enterprise IT requirements for end-user mobility and development and deployment of complex cloud applications.

  • 03/30/2012
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Akamai Technologies, Inc., has introduced Terra Alta, an enterprise-class solution designed to address the evolving complexities of application acceleration in the cloud.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to the cloud to reap economic benefits and effectively extend the reach of business applications to users outside the bounds of the traditional corporate network in terms of physical location and device type. At the same time, IT managers must find efficient ways to overcome issues of latency, availability, security, and application control that can adversely impact web application performance and degrade the end user experience.

To help mitigate the performance challenges enterprises face when using the public Internet for application delivery, Akamai’s Terra Alta enables an increasingly mobile enterprise user base. In addition, Terra Alta simplifies the process of developing and deploying applications in the cloud, making it easier to optimize hundreds or thousands of applications with greater flexibility and control.

As applications themselves evolve, Terra Alta accelerates complex applications that rely on multiple components that may include business functions, modules, or Web services from within other applications. Terra Alta can be easily deployed within an enterprises’ existing network architecture, allowing IT decision makers to avoid making changes to network equipment investments already made.

At its core, Terra Alta takes advantage of the massively distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform to provide enterprises with capabilities that improve the user experience for Internet-delivered applications regardless of where they are hosted. New features introduced with Terra Alta meet the requirements of enterprise and cloud readiness, increased performance, and simplicity of deployment and use.

In the area of enterprise and cloud readiness, Terra Alta maps to the way enterprises are deploying and delivering critical business applications. Important new features in this area include:

  • Enterprise Edge: Recognizing that Web applications are hosted at the origin as well as in the cloud, Terra Alta enhances the reach of the Akamai Intelligent Platform by extending into the enterprise with Enterprise Edge. This virtual machine, running Akamai optimization technology within a customer’s origin, allows optimizations from the Akamai Intelligent Platform to be carried from the Internet into the data center, improving overall application performance across the entire delivery environment.

  • Edge Load Balancing: For enterprises taking advantage of public cloud deployments, Edge Load Balancing ensures that application traffic can be load balanced globally across the web before traffic impacts an isolated single data center.

  • Enterprise DNS Mapping: Enables organizations to overcome the performance challenges caused by centralized DNS by dynamically adapting to user location and removing dependencies on enterprise DNS infrastructure re-designs.

With Terra Alta, Akamai is offering customers a 100 percent global performance improvement SLA over origin-alone applications. New features designed to deliver unrivaled acceleration capabilities across an extremely broad set of web applications include:

  • Web Deduplication: This feature is designed to ensure that only differences in the objects that have already been sent by the origin are delivered, reducing bandwidth consumption required for application delivery and drastically increasing performance.

  • Akamai Instant: Based on Web analytical data, Akamai Instant retrieves what are assessed as the most likely pages the user will request next; this can reduce long think times associated with Web service calls, database lookups, and other processing found in complex applications that can adversely affect application response times. This approach abstracts origin infrastructure challenges by leveraging Akamai’s Intelligent Platform to bring content closer to the user with fewer trips to the origin.

  • Dynamic Page Caching: This capability allows pages that were previously considered dynamic and un-cacheable to be conditionally cached.

Terra Alta is easy to deploy and consume in a manner best mapped to business requirements. New capabilities designed to meet customer requirements for simplicity include:

  • Streamlined packages that allow enterprises to buy sets of application slots that can be easily interchanged as dictated by business requirements, such as seasonality or proof of concept testing, supported by traffic levels designed to serve even the most demanding application needs.

  • Mobile Detect and Redirect supports delivery of applications to mobile users by simplifying the process of addressing and delivering mobile business applications, which can significantly improve the user experience. The result is an enterprise-wide application optimization platform that can be easily leveraged across any application -- public cloud, origin and mobile -- being delivered over the Internet.

  • InstantConfig allows IT teams to quickly deploy and provision multiple applications -- cloud or origin based -- with a simple, dynamic, and instant configuration accomplished through the newly redesigned customer portal.

Terra Alta is available now with packages supporting sets of 3, 5, and 10 applications. More information is available here.

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