Concerns about the capacity of own servers for launching new content.
| Image Co., Ltd. is a clothing mail order firm that is very popular among young women and has been listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange since January 2003. Image net Co., Ltd. was spun off from Image Co., Ltd. in December 2004 as its web business division. The online shopping site of Image net offers over 5,000 items, including clothing, lingerie, shoes, jewelry, accessories and even health and beauty products, serving as a complete fashion shopping mall for young women. |
Mr. Kentaro Kodaira, Manager, Innovation Unit, Infrastructure Section and responsible for infrastructure building and operation of the Image net site, explains why he decided to adopt the new service: "Our site operation used to be entirely dependent on our own origin server, although because of the number of merchandise pictures on the site we were aware of a growth in load on the server. A plan to launch new content featuring Flash technology would also put further pressure on server capacity."
"An increase in the server load can slow or halt access to web pages. For an online shopping site, longer page download times can be very serious because it may frustrate shoppers, which means we could lose prospective customers. So we needed to overhaul our web system quickly before the implementation of new content."
Creation of a reliable web environment without enhancing the infrastructure.
Mr. Kentaro Kodaira |
"Although enhancing our own infrastructure
was an option, we decided to use external content delivery services
for the planned new content, taking into account potential investment
in servers and bandwidth, operational costs and lead time. During this
process, we received a proposal from NTT Communications that outlined its "Content Delivery Service" Mr. Kodaira says .
The Smart Content Delivery is a system in which geographically dispersed
cache servers are deployed between end users and the customer's server.
Since these cache servers handle access from users, the load on the
customer's server can be minimised. Load balancing is used to solve
congestion, providing a fast and reliable web environment.
"Of course we reviewed competitive solutions, but we chose NTT Communication
because its service was the most attractive in terms of operational
costs, while being capable of delivering the performance we needed.
In-house implementation may have been possible, but implementation with
minimal effort was a great benefit to us," Mr. Kodaira explains.
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