My favorite part is
"With the deal, Digital Island would have the largest network by far in
terms of the number of servers being operated. The companies expect to
deploy 1,000 servers in 2000, 3,500 in 2001, and the remainder in 2002. The
deployment compliments Digital Island's seven regional data centers. The
network would span 21 countries, the companies said in a statement."
It seems like the press is grabbing the number of servers as a figure of
merit. But there's probably no good way to know whether Digital Island's
plan makes sense or whether they're overbuilding. There's also some
semi-loopy stuff in the press about Digital Island using multiprocessors,
whereas it's not clear whether Akamai does. (And it's not clear that it
matters).
So we can probably expect Akamai to announce plans for a 10,000-server
network soon.
--Mark
Mark Day
Senior Scientist
SightPath