A cache cluster provides several benefits in contrast to single boxes. A router or load balancer 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 users won't even notice any problems. With CacheMARA's unique backup feature the HTTP proxy is even able to continue serving requests in case some or all of the hard drives failed.
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 origin server. Therefore the available connection limit can be used optimally to be able to serve a larger amount of users.
Combining several caches to a cache cluster improves performance and increases the total cache storage size. Requests that are misses in one of the caches may be hits in one of the neighbor caches. A cache can download the requested object from a neighbor much faster and without contacting the origin server on the Internet. This saves bandwidth and traffic and results in faster responses to the user.
Each ISP has its own infrastructure and needs, so the CacheMARA cluster will be especially tailored to your needs, preventing you from spending additional money on an over sized solution. CacheMARA is shipped as a scalable cluster of caches and allows arbitrary extension as your network is growing.
CacheMARA currently supports several intercache communication protocols, which enable clustered proxies to communicate with each other. Among these are 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 providing more detailed requests to the neighbor caches.
CacheMARA also supports Cache Digests, a communication protocol 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 look-ups can be performed locally without sending requests to all neighbors. Using Cache-Digests in a cache cluster dramatically improves user response times and thus browsing experience.
CacheMARA's cluster management allows you to introduce new caches into your cluster as your network is growing. Existing appliances do not have to be replaced by large and expensive single boxes.
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