Akamai Introduces Terra Alta Application Acceleration Platform

Cloud platform provider Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) introduced Terra Alta, an enterprise-class solution designed to address the evolving complexities of application acceleration in the cloud. Terra Alta helps simplify 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. Terra Alta has also been designed to enable an increasingly mobile enterprise user base, and is available with packages supporting sets of three, five and 10 applications.

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

€œEnterprises are increasingly extending their IT infrastructure outside of the boundaries of their own data centers€”embracing cloud computing, as well as delivering content and applications over the Internet,€ said Lydia Leong, research vice president of IT analytics firm Gartner. €œHowever, they face a new array of availability and performance challenges that may impact end-user adoption, acceptance and productivity, and need solutions for these challenges.€

In the area of enterprise and cloud readiness, Terra Alta is intended to map to the way enterprises are deploying and delivering business applications. Features in this area include Enterprise Edge, a virtual machine running Akamai optimization technology within a customer€™s origin, which allows optimizations from the Akamai Intelligent Platform to be carried from the Internet into the data center.

For enterprises taking advantage of public cloud deployments, Edge load balancing is designed to ensure that application traffic can be load-balanced globally across the Web before traffic impacts an isolated single data center. Enterprise Domain Name System (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 redesigns.

Features designed to deliver acceleration capabilities across a broad set of Web applications include Web de-duplication, 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; Akamai Instant, which retrieves what are assessed as the most likely pages to be next requested by the user; and dynamic page caching, which allows pages that were previously considered dynamic and un-cacheable to be conditionally cached.

€œCompanies want to use the cloud as an enterprise application delivery environment because it€™s the most effective and efficient way to reach the broadest set of users. Unfortunately, controlling the cloud can seriously erode the promises and expectations of cloud computing,€ said Willie Tejada, senior vice president and general manager of the enterprise cloud division at Akamai. €œWith the release of Terra Alta, we€™re giving our customers solutions designed to provide the best possible performance for their portfolio of cloud-delivered business applications.€