NASA portal on it's way...

eTouch Systems Corp., and Speedera Networks, the emerging leader in global content delivery services, have announced that they have partnered to provide a comprehensive SpeedSuite edge delivery solution for NASA as part of a program to consolidate all 3,000 of the space agency's Web sites and make them accessible through a single portal. After the recent deployment of Speedera's services, the NASA portal experienced a three-fold improvement in performance. Web page download times are now between 0.8 and 1.0 seconds and NASA has broken into the top ten U.S. Government Web sites with the fastest average performance, as ranked by the Keynote Government Internet Performance Index (KG40).

The NASA Portal Project contract was awarded to eTouch, the prime contractor, which is also providing the content management system. eTouch partnered with Speedera to provide a broad suite of content delivery network (CDN) services. Other eTouch partners included in the project are Sprint Corp., which is providing Web site hosting services, and Critical Mass, Inc., which is responsible for providing the interface architecture and the NASA audience-tested user interface.

As part of this project, eTouch is using Speedera's SpeedSuite solution to provide NASA a comprehensive suite of CDN services that includes whole site delivery, streaming media, load balancing and advanced site monitoring. Key to this solution is the SpeedSuite Traffic Balancer service, which provides global load balancing between two origin sites housed in two Sprint datacenters. It intelligently routes client requests to the fastest available customer site, shifting traffic from an overloaded or failed site to overcome network congestion and site outages, thus maximizing performance and availability.

Planned since last summer, the NASA portal project originated with a mandate from NASA top officials to make the portal a key element in inspiring the next generation of explorers.

The NASA portal project is one of many in the growing initiative towards making government and its agencies more accessible to the public. In NASA's case, the public benefits through simpler, faster and more reliable access to the vast breadth of information available through NASA's sites, which can amount to millions of documents. To ensure that the public will always be able to access this content, the contract requires 99.995% availability.

"Consolidating Web site delivery is more efficient using Speedera's global content delivery network, and provides an optimal architecture to meet high traffic demands from planned and unplanned events," said Aniruddha Gadre, President of eTouch. "NASA needed a complete and elegant solution that streamlines both content management and content delivery."

"Agencies like NASA have realized this comprehensive solution for an integrated portal is needed for bringing order to the chaos of too many Web sites," said Ajit Gupta, CEO and president of Speedera Networks. "Also, by housing frequently requested content on multiple servers distributed worldwide, Speedera shortens the distance between Internet users and the data they seek in order to improve performance and reliability. By outsourcing the management of the site, the Federal Government can stretch budget dollars in this lean economy rather than spend money on building and maintaining an expensive Web site infrastructure."

"NASA is in the business of space exploration," Gupta continued. "Speedera is in the business of helping Internet explorers get to their destination fast and reliably."