The Boston Globe souped up the performance of its Boston.com Web site by using the services of a content delivery network vendor to handle high-bandwidth multimedia.

The site last year began using Mirror Image Internet Inc. to manage video and other bandwidth-intensive elements, said Jeff Moriarty, Boston.com’s vice president of product and technology.

Boston.com saw increased demand for video after using Mirror Image Internet to handle high-bandwidth content.

“We have a couple of very popular video partners in New England Cable News and New England Sports Network,” he said. “We power their Web sites and we have exclusive rights to distribute their video. We knew that the popularity of video on our site was increasing, so we needed to find a solution that could handle a lot of streams.”

Streamlines traffic

Mirror Image, like other content delivery networks, or CDNs, helps speed Web traffic by positioning its servers at strategic points around the Internet.

When a user requests a particular item, Mirror Image determines the most appropriate server from which to route the information.  

This eliminates the risks associated with having only one or a handful of servers at a central location to handle user requests. If a large segment of the Web ever should go down because of traffic congestion or outright failure, thousands of customers can be cut off.

Newspaper Web sites are especially vulnerable. When a national story breaks and hundreds of thousands of requests occur in the space of minutes, even the largest server farms can be taxed to their maximum.

Case in point: 9/11, where some sites were all but inaccessible due to heavy traffic.

Enter Tewksbury, Mass.-based Mirror Image. The six-year-old supplier relies on a “less is more” philosophy, using a network of larger, but fewer servers, said Bob Hammond, chief technology officer.

Bob Hammond

“I’m a big platforms person,” he said. “I like big systems, so we partnered up with [companies like] Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Dell and Cisco. We run Oracle databases in the back - that allows us to keep track of metadata information about the storage of our objects, and that’s running on the big HP gear. A lot of our systems in front of that are Sun Solaris.”

By sprinkling fewer servers within a widely distributed environment, the more potentially reliable the network can be, Hammond said. The design also requires less replication among the network, thus enabling customers to refresh content more quickly.

Still hosts HTML

While Boston.com has entrusted its multimedia to Mirror Image, it still serves HTML from its Massachusetts data center, Moriarty said.

That’s primarily because most of the updates on Boston.com are still centered about text; image and video updates occur less frequently, he said.

Still, Moriarty said that the explosion of broadband access, especially in the Boston metropolitan area, has dramatically increased the demand for streaming video.

 “Last year at this time, we were serving between 200,000 and 300,000 video clips a month,” he said. “Now in the same time period we’re up around 2 million. The need was definitely there for a partner like Mirror Image that had a pricing model that allowed us to scale and be flexible as these applications evolved.”