Key Impacts
- Originally built to support 1 million visitors per month, the ESA portal is now able to sustain 1 million visitors a day
- Visitors are offered an average download time of 1.5 seconds per web page, no matter the number of visitors or number of downloaded web pages
- Instant scalability made ESA able to automatically increase its bandwidth up to 300 Mbps to sustain traffic peaks
- Without making any modification to their own infrastructure, ESA was able to sustain, in a three week period, 6 TB of data downloaded on its portal by 3.6 million visitors
How do you ensure 100% availability and performance when the sky's NOT the limit? For the European Space Agency (ESA), the answer is Akamai. The ESA website, which keeps visitors informed on the latest space news and offers a host of information on European space activities, is one of the leading space websites in the world. It attracts more than one million unique visitors each month—many coming to download material from the agency's impressive multimedia gallery. While the site is based in Europe, visitors from North America and the rest of the world comprise nearly half the site's traffic. To increase the accessibility and the performance of its portal, the ESA uses Akamai EdgeSuite and Akamai Streaming to ensure that dynamic content and high quality sound and video can be broadcast online with very short downloading times—wherever users connect from.
The true test for ESA and Akamai came in 2005 with the launch of the Huygens probe from the Cassini spacecraft towards Saturn's satellite, Titan. In just one week following the Cassini launch, the ESA website received 3.6 million visitors, who viewed a total of 29 million pages and downloaded 6 TB of data. On January 14, 2005, the day on which the probe landed on Titan's surface, a total of 900,000 visitors visited a total of 6.5 million pages on the website. Throughout this real-life test, the Akamai solution performed brilliantly, resulting in virtually no degradation in performance or availability—ensuring success for the ESA website’s most popular event to date.
"We would never have been able to achieve such a high performance rate without Akamai, and it wouldn't have made sense to invest directly in our own infrastructure.."
—Jürgen Scholz, Information Systems Engineer, ESA Information Systems Department
