No Better Time by Molly Knight Raskin

Author:Molly Knight Raskin [Raskin, Molly Knight]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2013-06-20T07:00:00+00:00

If anything had the potential to demonstrate the limitations of the Internet under stress, it was breaking news. “Some of the largest and most unpredictable hot spots were in the news business,” said Sagan, who experienced the problem firsthand when he served as president of New Media at Time, Inc. And when news sites crashed, the cost to the organization was immeasurable. “Reputations in news could be made or broken on the day of a big story,” Sagan said, noting that a banner day of breaking news coverage could result in a ten-year run of dominance. The same was soon true, he explained, of news online: “It became essential to win stories on the Web.” Akamai was perfectly poised to help news organizations that wanted to win more online followers. The biggest and most popular of these was CNN.com.

At the end of August 1995, CNN Interactive launched CNN.com. It rapidly became one of the busiest sites on the web, and within two years had expanded to include CNNFN (Financial Network), and CNNSI (Sports Illustrated). Sam Gassel, then the chief systems engineer for CNN Internet Technologies, had served as the architect of CNN’s web system since its launch. Even before joining CNN he had been building web servers as a systems administrator for the University of Chicago.

One of Gassel’s greatest challenges was managing the flash crowds generated by breaking news, which he and his team of experienced engineers were working diligently to tackle. When traffic peaked, they turned to a large arsenal of technological weapons and strategies including the reallocation of a server from one of CNN’s less trafficked Web sites to one struggling or stripping content down to the bare minimum by removing photographs and logos that occupied bandwidth. As early as 1997 they had also begun to experiment with caching technologies.

Gassel first met with Jonathan Seelig and John Sconyers in the fall of 1998. Recognizing the Akamai concept as a logical step forward, he was intrigued, but skeptical. “I told them if you can build this and run it—and we have our doubts—then get back to us.” The dialogue continued and after a few more calls with Sconyers, Seelig and Lewin, Gassel agreed to test an invisible image on one of CNN’s sites as part of Akamai’s test trial.

A few months later, Lewin and Sagan took a trip to Atlanta determined to score CNN as a customer. Lewin was armed with what he believed to be a compelling point in his sales pitch: CNN could one day see a news event so huge that no amount of servers or bandwidth could handle it. The Internet users of the world would turn to CNN, which billed itself “the most trusted name in news,” only to find blank or skeletal Web pages.

Gassel clearly recalls his first encounter with Lewin: “He was a bundle of energy,” he said. “And he was awestruck when he saw both the newsroom and all our racks of servers.” Sagan, who knew Gassel from when he [Sagan] had worked at Time Inc.

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