Press Release

NASA Girds for Another Busy Year of High Web Traffic

By SpaceRef Editor
January 7, 2005
Filed under , ,
NASA Girds for Another Busy Year of High Web Traffic
http://images.spaceref.com/news/corplogos/nasa.jpg

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Web portal
continues to drive high traffic numbers — more than 17 billion hits
in 2004, report both NASA and Speedera Networks, a leading global
provider of on-demand distributed application hosting and content
delivery services. Speedera delivers content from the space agency’s
portal to visitors seeking access to the site from around the world.
Popular events on the NASA Web site, including the ongoing Mars
Exploration Rover mission entering its remarkable second year, as well
as upcoming major projects such as the launch and comet encounter of
NASA’s Deep Impact satellite mission in 2005, are expected to drive
continued high levels of traffic, according to NASA officials.

Speedera and eTouch Systems Corp. of Fremont, Calif., the prime
contractor who manages the NASA portal, both say they are girding
themselves for the pending traffic surge. eTouch Systems, which
provides NASA with its Web content management system, partnered with
Speedera to provide a broad suite of content delivery network services
for the space agency. This combined solution proved more than robust
enough to handle the massive spikes in traffic triggered by the twin
Mars Rovers that landed on the Red Planet in early 2004. During the
January landings, Speedera reported that its network handled peak load
of nearly seven gigabits per second for NASA as the space agency said
it received more than four billion hits to its Web site in that month
alone. As the mission continues, NASA officials expect interest from
Web visitors to keep growing.

“Speedera and eTouch have both been excellent partners to NASA and
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in providing critical support to the
Mars Rover Web presence,” said Jeanne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect
with NASA’s JPL. “They helped support more than 17 billion hits to the
NASA portal in 2004. We are delighted with Speedera’s reliable service
and excellent customer focus. I couldn’t have asked for better
partners than Speedera and eTouch Systems during this very busy year
at the space agency.”

The estimated number of visitors in 2004 is well over 142 million,
according to traffic studies by both NASA and Speedera, with the
average visitor spending more than 8 minutes browsing across 14 pages
each time they visited the NASA site. Interest continues to remain
high surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover mission as the twin rovers
Spirit and Opportunity have posted more than 50,000 images of the Red
Planet on the Mars Rover site (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov) within
the NASA Portal. In the meantime, other space missions continue to
drive traffic to the Web portal, including the Cassini space probe
flyby, which is snapping images of Saturn, its moons, and its rings.

NASA officials say they expect another busy year in 2005 as
scientists prepare to aim a disc-shaped copper projectile directly
into the oncoming path of a comet to blast a crater through the
comet’s skin. Launch date of the “Deep Impact” satellite mission is
January 12, and the probe is expected to collide with the racing comet
sometime in July.

“As the Mars Rover and Deep Impact missions continue to fire the
imagination of the next generation of space explorers, down here on
Earth we will be working closely with our key partner eTouch to ensure
that NASA site visitors can continue to access graphically rich
content in under two seconds,” said Ajit Gupta, CEO and President of
Speedera Networks. “By providing eTouch’s elegant content management
solution combined with our on-demand distributed network, NASA can
focus on what it does best — exploring outer space.”

“Speedera’s architecture has proved robust enough to meet even the
highest demands of Web traffic from around the globe — the Mars Rover
experience is proof of that,” said Aniruddha Gadre, President of
eTouch. “Going forward in 2005, we are confident that together we can
ensure access to NASA’s Web portal and meet high traffic demands from
planned and unplanned events.”

The following metrics for NASA’s Web portal are for January 1,
12:01 a.m. through December 4, 2004 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

----------- ------------ -------------- --------------- --------------
              Visitors       Pages       Hits (number     Amount of
                             Viewed        of items      Information
                                          requested)    Sent to Public
                                                         (megabytes)
----------- ------------ -------------- --------------- --------------
NASA Portal 142,970,453  1,658,229,279  16,844,505,245    321,926,352
----------- ------------ -------------- --------------- --------------
Mars Sites   69,935,162    573,904,873   9,125,886,691    145,770,840
----------- ------------ -------------- --------------- --------------
NASA Web TV   1,132,585        N/A          15,782,891     94,815,803
----------- ------------ -------------- --------------- --------------
Source: NASA

About Speedera Networks

Speedera Networks, Inc. is a leading global provider of
distributed application hosting and content delivery services. The
company’s SpeedSuite family of services provides on-demand services
that cost-effectively solve the performance, scalability, availability
and security problems of distributed applications and Web sites.
Speedera’s edge delivery network is deployed in the Americas, Europe
and the Asia-Pacific region, with connectivity to over 1000 carrier
networks, controlled by a patented global traffic management system.
Customers include leading organizations such as American Eagle
Outfitters, DoubleClick, Fox Broadcasting, Macromedia, NASA, Sony
Music Entertainment, and Univision. The company’s channel partners
include Softbank Broadmedia/Club iT, BT, VSNL, Hewlett-Packard,
AboveNet, and Inflow. For more information about Speedera, please call
408-970-1528, visit www.speedera.com or email info@speedera.com. To
request a white paper, please click on
http://www.speedera.com/reqtechpaper.htm. To request a demo, please
click on http://www.speedera.com/reqdemo.htm.

Contact:

Speedera Networks

Jay Mejia, 408-970-1583

jmejia@speedera.com

SpaceRef staff editor.