IBM Offers New Netfinity Software Speeds Up Delivery of Web Pages, Boosts Overall Server Performance

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San Jose, CA (September 29, 1998) – IBM today announced a new software product, available exclusively on IBM’s Netfinity servers, that provides Web site administrators such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with the ability to deliver up to 60% more page requests per minute over competitive Intel processor-based servers.(1) Called Netfinity Web Server Accelerator, this software also significantly improves overall system performance.
Netfinity customers can download the software at no additional charge at: http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/solutions/netfinity/server_accelerator.
“One of the greatest benefits of this technology is that it provides Web site administrators, particularly ISPs, with ‘more bang for the buck.’ An ISP can host more Web sites per server as well as significantly increase the number of customers it supports per server,” said Phil Hester, vice president for systems technology in IBM’s Personal Systems Group.
“This new technology is just one example of the many solutions IBM is bringing to ISPs to help them reduce their costs and improve their overall quality of service — two essential factors for surviving in today’s competitive market.”
This technology, a standard caching reverse proxy software program created by IBM Research, delivers the capability of caching and storing static file content at the lowest levels of the operating system. In doing so, the Netfinity Web Server Accelerator effectively “frees up” the server to deliver more cycles, therefore delivering greater capability to perform additional tasks such as:
processing dynamic Web content in e-commerce applications such as on-line shopping, secure electronic transactions and database searches;
hosting more content; and,
supporting more subscribers/clients.
The Netfinity Web Server Accelerator is available worldwide solely with Netfinity servers. Once downloaded onto a Netfinity server, the software can be added as an application to a wide range of Internet Web servers running on Microsoft Windows NT including Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server, Novell Fastrac and Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0 and 4.0.
In a separate announcement today, IBM unveiled a complementary caching solution for ISPs called the Web Cache Manager, an Internet storage server that can dramatically reduce long-distance data transmission costs, decrease network bottlenecks and improve response time for Internet and intranet users. Although both caching solutions speed up the delivery of Web content, the Web Cache Manager accelerates the rate of incoming content (i.e. that which a person gathers), while the Netfinity Web Server Accelerator increases the speed of outgoing content (i.e. that which is leaving a Web site). Combined, these two solutions work together to help ISPs increase the overall speed of their Web content-delivery infrastructures.

Source: IBM

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