Enterprises can tap into more than a decade's worth of statistics on global Internet performance, plus real-time data, with a new SaaS (software-as-a-service) product from Dyn, the parent company of network monitor Renesys.
Dyn's current and historical information spans multiple service providers' networks, giving enterprises insights that any one carrier won't be able to provide, said Scott Hilton, Dyn's executive vice president of products. They can use that data both for planning, to select service providers and data-center locations, and for ongoing operations. For example, Dyn can tell companies where and when customers are likely to be seeing poor performance on their website so they can take corrective action.
Dyn used to provide that kind of information through custom consulting engagements with enterprises. Now customers can buy a subscription, log in and get access to all the data instantly, though many are likely to use a one-time quick-start service in which Dyn will help them set up alarms, thresholds and other settings, Hilton said. The service, called Dyn Internet Intelligence (DII), is available now. Dyn isn't disclosing prices, which it said will vary based on a range of factors.
As companies try to reach customers around the world and evaluate options including cloud computing services and content delivery networks, it can be valuable to know how well-connected a particular location is and what users are experiencing at any given time. Based on those data points, enterprises can choose both where to place their resources and whether to re-route their traffic to another carrier or their workloads to a cloud provider, Hilton said.
For example, one customer that's expanding into the Asia-Pacific region used DII to decide whether to set up in a collocation center and in which city, or whether to turn to a cloud such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The data in DII told that company which cities and sites had the best Internet links and how well AWS and Azure had been performing across the region, Hilton said.
Dyn has more than 150 sensors operating around the world that interact with more than 25 million endpoints to determine how the Internet is performing. As part of DII, it can also set up sensors -- which are lightweight virtual machines -- in a company's own infrastructure to test response using those same 25 million endpoints. If a company is using a public cloud service, DII can also tell it where in the world its IP address space or domain is running on that cloud provider's infrastructure, Hilton said.
Renesys, based in New Hampshire, has long monitored the Internet and analyzed events that affected Internet performance, including outages in Egypt, Syria and Sudan. Dyn, also based in New Hampshire, bought Renesys in May.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com