User:Kkeller0704/Internap

Founded in May 1996, Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP) is a publicly traded company headquartered in Atlanta, GA that enables fast, reliable connectivity and delivery of rich media over the Internet. Its customers are companies that use the Internet for direct sales, supply chain management, relationship building and collaboration. Internap’s three business units include Internet Protocol (IP), data center and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services.

The company delivers its Performance IP, CDN and Data Center services through Private Network Access Points (PNAPs) in North America, Europe, Asia, India and Australia.

Internap’s Performance IP products are unique because they rely on a patented architecture called Managed Internet Route Optimizer (MIRO) to select the optimal path for data transit on the Internet.

In May 2000, Internap acquired CO Space and officially entered the colocation market. The company offers colocation services in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Phoenix, Denver, Europe and Asia Pac. In 2008, the company reported that revenue from data center services was slightly less than half of the company’s total revenue.

Internap Network Services acquired VitalStream Holdings, Inc., in February 2007. Following the acquisition, Internap provides customers with the ability to store and deliver audio and video digital media over the Internet via a CDN. Internap is a provider of the only route-optimized CDN (based upon MIRO technology).

Internap has approximately 3000 customers in the U.S. and abroad and approximately 400 employees.

Managed Internet Route Optimizer MIRO
Internap's patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer (MIRO) technology preceded its CDN offering. The technology was created to monitor the performance of multiple Internet backbone networks, routing traffic “to automatically select the best path across the Internet for mission-critical enterprise data at any given point in time”. MIRO is an alternative to Border Gateway Protocol, the existing method for data delivery or routing over the Internet.

MIRO considers path characteristics like latency, packet loss, route stability and congestion when making routing decisions. It analyzes the traffic situation on the major Internet backbone including AT&T Inc., Sprint Nextel Corporation, Verizon Communications Inc., Global Crossing Limited and Level 3 Communications, Inc., and routing decisions are made dynamically and automatically to account for network performance changes. The customer’s content is pushed to the channel most clear of congestion at any given point in time.

Private Network Access Point (P-NAP)
Internap developed the industry's first proprietary routing and route management technology, designed to directly deliver data to and from destinations across the Internet in a faster, more reliable manner. The company has Private Network Access Point (P-NAP) facilities part of a solution that promises customers superior Internet reliability. Each P-NAP facility is a localized architecture that houses direct interconnectivity with the major backbones, thus abrogating any functional dependency of the P-NAP facility’s ability to deliver traffic upon the health of any one backbone. Within the P-NAP facility, Internap uses ASsimilator 3 (AS3) route-optimization technology to augment BGP with performance based routing capabilities that use the P-NAPs’ redundant architecture and backbone interconnections.

ASsimilator 3 (AS3)
The Internap proprietary network-based routing technology, ASsimilator 3 (AS3), was developed to overcome the limitations of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

BGP, used by nodes on the borders of Autonomous Systems (AS), selects which adjacent AS should be transited in order to reach any node located in some external AS. Rather than using actual performance measurements, BGP uses heuristics to select the path that is assumed to provide the best performance. BGP generally assumes that paths that transit fewer ASes will offer superior performance. This assumption would be valid if every AS were equal. However, the assumption breaks down in practice because the performance penalty incurred from transiting each AS can vary substantially. If a chosen path bypasses a congested router, this path may be superior to one that transits fewer ASes.

Similarly, if there are several paths to a given destination, each transiting the same number of ASes, then minimizing the number of AS hops does not disambiguate the paths. In this scenario, BGP’s path selection is usually arbitrary. It does not incorporate sufficient path characteristics to effectively distinguish between alternatives. While BGP’s assumptions may have been valid when first introduced, the Internet has changed substantially since then. The BGP algorithm is no longer adequate, given the more demanding nature of the applications that run on the Internet as well as the increased scale and complexity that now characterize the Internet.

Because BGP is not able to access the full range of path characteristics that are sometimes necessary to make correct path selections, BGP allows operators to specify preferences to control the path selection. However, manually overriding BGP is not very scalable beyond simple traffic shaping and shunting around large-scale routing phenomena. The performance of a given AS may change regionally and over time, but manually accounting for all such special cases is not feasible. Even if it were possible to manually adjust routing to account for dynamic performance changes, the simultaneous problem of assigning traffic based on available capacity can be computationally very challenging. If capacity is provisioned efficiently, this problem can become too difficult to solve manually.

AS3 addresses the algorithmic limitations of BGP by adding performance and other path and traffic characteristics to its route selection process. It runs continuously in each Private Network Access Point (P-NAP) and dynamically adjusts to changing network and traffic conditions. When it selects a new routing table, those path selections are automatically injected into BGP without any human intervention.

In practice, this technique does not always behave in a manner superior to BGP.

Some may say it would be arrogant for a company with a marginal throughput performance record to think they could outsmart an army of IP routing professionals and academics who have been working to optimize BGP for over 20 years.

Customers
Internap’s approximate 3,000 customers belong to industries that rely on the Internet as a part of their business. Those industries include finance, technology, retail, media/publishing, online gaming, travel, healthcare, entertainment and education.