CacheMARA ISP Key Features Overview
Setting up several caches to a cache cluster improves performance and saves valuable traffic. Requests that are misses in one cache may be hits in one of the neighbor caches. If a neighbor cache has cached the requested file other caches can download it from this neighbor faster and without contacting the originserver. This saves bandwidth and traffic and results in a faster response to the user.
CacheMARA currently supports several intercache-communication approaches, which enable clustered proxies to communicate with each other.
Among these is the legacy protocol ICP, which was the first protocol of this type, still being very popular today.
Another supported protocol is the Hypertext Caching Protocol (HTCP), which is the successor of ICP. It delivers better results by issuing more detailed requests to the neighbor caches.
CacheMARA also supports Cache Digests, a solution especially tailored for high-end scenarios. While ICP and HTCP introduce an additional delay for each request by asking all neighbors, Cache Digests work differently. Each cache stores a table of contents of its neighbors, which are periodically updated. Since each cache contains an index of all cached data in the cluster, all lookups can be performed locally whithout sending requests to all neighbors. Using Cache Digests in a cache cluster dramatically improves user response times and the overall browsing experience.
MARA Systems does not restrict its ISP customers to fix-sized appliances. Each ISP has its own infrastructure and needs, so CacheMARA ISP will be especially tailored to your needs, preventing you from spending additional money on an oversized product. CacheMARA ISP is shipped as a scalable cluster of caches which allows arbitrary extensions as your network is growing.
A cache cluster provides several benefits in contrast to single boxes. A proxy cache cluster provides advanced load balancing. A router in front of the proxies can evenly distribute the requests among the cluster, enabling the cluster to serve considerably more requests than single boxes. With a cluster also comes increased reliability. A hardware failure of a single box leads to a denial of service, whereas a hardware failure of a proxy within a cluster only puts slightly more traffic on the remaining proxies. The client users won't even notice any problems. With CacheMARA's unique failsafe feature the HTTP proxy is even able to continue serving requests in case of a hard-disk failure, which only leads to disabled caching and logging functionality.
In order to optimize traffic flow, CacheMARA supports persistent connections to origin servers and clients. Only one connection is created for multiple requests of the same user or to the same originserver. Therefore the available connection limit can be used optimally to be able to serve a larger amount of users.
Video portals and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) cause high traffic amount for ISPs and add additional load on the proxy caches.
A CDN is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to more efficiently deliver content like applications, media streams or software to users. A CDN uses different approaches to chose a server that will give the best performance for a certain user. It can do this based on locality, response time, server load and other criteria.
As Web 2.0 steadily evolves, video and media streaming portals become more and more popular. With a growing number of users, the traffic caused by such portals constitutes a continually increasing amount of the total HTTP traffic. Caching dynamic content is unfortunately not trivial, since portals like youtube.com specifically developed techniques that prevent their flash videos from being effectively distributed by caches. Each video request from youtube contains a changing, non-random argument next to the actual name of the video. To make things worse, youtube uses a farm of servers for load balancing to cope with the massive amount of incoming video requests.
Thereby the load balancing methods of video portals and CDNs make use of varying subdomains, i.e. requested files may appear under different URLs. The implication is that the HTTP proxy might cache the same file several times with different URLs. To be capable of caching such dynamic content, the cache needs to be able to recognize that these URLs belong to the same file.
CacheMARA ISP offers a unique caching mechanism that enables caching for leading video portals and CDNs. This feature is especially tailored for ISPs to save valuable traffic, preventing the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade or enabling the ISP to offer additional features like Voice-over-IP. Users will also benefit from faster content delivery and thus, will have a better browsing experience.
Flexible log data facilities are supplied to monitor access to the cache. CacheMARA provides several log formats, e.g. Squid, Squidmime, Apache combined and custom log formats.
In addition to this, syslog support enables logging to remote servers. The main benefit of using one or more dedicated syslog servers is that the cache appliance is freed from load and, thus, more disk-space is available for caching. By setting up a dedicated syslog server, more hard-disks can be used, which ensures storage of access log data for a longer period of time.
WCCP Support
WCCP is a content-routing protocol developed by Cisco that provides a method to redirect traffic flows in real-time.
It features load balancing, fault tolerance, scaling and service-assurance mechanisms. Furthermore it enables transparent caching with a WCCP-compliant router using Layer2 rewriting or IP-GRE encapsulation. CacheMARA supports both protocol versions v1 and v2.
CacheMARA is delivered with an innovative web management Graphical User Interface which uses one of the latest web technologies available (Adobe Flex). It is optimized to provide best usability and user guidance.
All available features are delivered with sophisticated default settings and can be changed within a few steps. Even more complex scenarios can be set up and maintained with little effort, allowing to save administration costs.
Administrators access the GUI via a browser using the HTTPS protocol. Besides configuring and maintaining the appliance, all core features are supplied with detailed live statistics. For advanced analysis purposes, all statistics are additionally delivered with higher granularity. Currently provided are statistics of the last day, last week, last month and last year. In order to provide full transparency, all log files created by CacheMARAs core features can be accessed through the management GUI.
For user convenience, all parts of the management GUI are offered in multiple languages. Currently featured languages are English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese. Languages can be switched directly in the GUI without having to install a different version or restarting the software.
Online updates keep your cache cluster up-to-date, enabling you to benefit from the latest improvements.
MARA Systems' partnership with Blue Coat enables us to provide our cache proxies with the world's leading content filtering software WebFilter.
Additionally CacheMARA improves overall filtering performance by caching WebFilter's rating responses. Read more about CacheMARA's unique integration of Webfilter here.
CacheMARA supports both transparent and non-transparent proxy modes.
In ISP scenarios cache proxies are usually set up in transparent mode, i.e. the cache is transparent to the clients. Users don't need to configure the proxy to be granted access to the Internet. At the same time users have to use the cache proxy and are not able to circumvent it, which enables the ISP to control all traffic from a central position.
In case of a non-transparent setup, CacheMARA supports user and group authentication through industry-standard authentication methods. Among the supported methods are