Web Caching Hardware

[MDKza]

Hey everyone,

What hardware do you use to do web caching?

With TMG leaving us we are looking for replacements, we have been given a product by Appliansys (Cachebox) which is a squid box with a GUI on top.

Just want to see other options out there.

Thanks,
MDK

 

[Tinuva]

For web caching don't see why you can't just run squid yourself for free?

If you want more than just web caching, there is some pretty good stuff out there, but depends on how much bandwidth you do, if you don't do enough the price won't be worth it.

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

For the office we are using a Sonicwall - provides webcaching, user monitoring, basic firewall and QoS - no fuss hardware which just works.

 

[MDKza]

We are looking for more of a hardware appliance.

The cachebox is pretty much a squid proxy anyway it just needs to be fast enough to handle a network of about 30 000 people.
Thats why we were looking for something prebuilt that we just need to configure.

 

[Tinuva]

Yeah for 30 000 people you want lotsa spindles for the secondary cache, and large memory for the primary cache.

Primary cache can be something like 20GB (so the machine should have 32GB memory), this is for tiny pages that gets accessed the most, and then you can have a larger cache on hard drives (spindles) for the less access pages and larger files that get downlaoded a lot. Can't go wrong with that, and serving out of memory cache, I am sure you can easily serve 30 000 people.

If you have a bar to spend, go for the PeerApp with web caching They sell you a box + DAS storage

 

[MDKza]

Cool will take a look @ that thanks,

The top model there is for CacheBox is about R300 000.

Will have to just see which one can give us a POC.

 

[Tinuva]

For the PeerApp, you can get it through Bytes, who I believe is the local support guys for it.

The PeerApp originally only cached Peer2Peer like torrents, file downloads, youtube videos, bunch of other types of streaming video sites. They then later on introduced http caching for websites, so ask for that specifically when you POC and get quotes. I think they use SSDs for the http caching. They also use Dell hardware for both server and the DAS (Direct Attached Storage array), so that should give you some idea on the hardware.

PeerApp is definitely the #1 caching device I have used. Also, I can't prove this, but certain ISPs including the big T use it for their ADSL networks.

 

[MDKza]

Thanks a lot,

Web caching was more of an added extra as they use mostly Youtube, which is the major objective of the caching.
They upload youtube videos to a private channel and use it for training.

 

[Tinuva]

Oh then you definitely want the PeerApp, Squid doesn't cache Youtube, unless you buy an addon like VideoCache from http://cachevideos.com/ and even then it didn't work that great for me to be honest. The PeerApp however has nice graphs to show you how much traffic it is pushing out from cache as well as for what types, youtube cache, bittorrent cache, soulseek cache, gnutella cache, http cache ect.