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The Customer
 Ikadega, Inc. is a technology
company that has developed a powerful, high-performance, low-cost,
horizontal hardware platform that efficiently stores and delivers
rich media content and other data files. This general-purpose
data delivery platform serves as the basis for solutions across
a number of vertical markets via I/O components that provide market-
or task-specificity to the core architecture. Founded in 2000
and based in Northbrook, Ill., Ikadega is staffed with employees
from leading technology companies, including 3COM, Allscripts,
AT&T, Lucent, Midway Games, Motorola and Zenith Electronics.
The Problem
With the growth of the Internet, the need for high-performance,
low-cost solutions for content storage and serving is growing
exponentially. The use of broadband and wireless technologies
is accelerating at remarkable rates, while new applications characterized
by rich digital content such as streaming video and webcasts are
being adopted by Fortune 500 Companies. In response to this exploding
need, content delivery networks, such as those offered by Internet
Service Providers, have been searching of effective and efficient
business solutions. To handle the payload, the need to invent
faster server and bigger storage media is evident. Understandably,
the costs associated with scaling these existing storage and delivery
solutions are increasingly disproportionate as performance demands
continue to grow. Moreover, with processor speeds doubling every
18 months, and disk drive capacity doubling at twice that rate,
it was clear that processor-based data delivery architectures,
with their inherent bus bottlenecks, were increasingly incapable
of delivering the huge quantities of data already required by
the expanding Internet.
The SSI Solution
 Recognizing this, Ikadega established an architecture, whose
underlying fundamentals are based on data transfer instead of
data processing. Ikadega designed a patent-pending "DirectPathTM
Architecure" as the technology solution of choice for content
storage efficiency and delivery performance. It will be the first
to provide the throughput content providers required, while at
the same time enabling them to store massive amounts of rich media
content and large data files closer to the user, with an unprecedented
low total cost of ownership.
Early on, Ikadega teamed with SSI engineers to aid in this architecture's
software development. Together, development teams have discussed
innovate way to maximize accelerated throughput on Ikadega's hardware
platforms as well as take advantage of the architecture's internal
non-blocking switched fabric, built entirely of FPGAs. Ikadega's
unique architecture supplies an aggregate sustained bandwidth
up to 40 times greater than that of single server solutions, at
a fraction of the size and cost.
In the process, the architecture has adapted issues and implementations
to bypass the kernel and minimize context switching. Such issues
included memory and cache management, stack handling, server/client
management, and file system stability.
Originally, the architecture was designed to simply be a big-performance
multimedia server. FTP, HTTP, and QuickTime support were the targeted
features. These form the basis of high-performance systems and
solutions spanning multiple markets, including Internet-based
streaming media, enterprise information services, and residential
video-on-demand. However, the need to plug-in the DirectPath architecture
into more networks became more and more evident. As a result,
the DirectPath architecture is evolving to accommodate features
such as NFS to become a general-purpose file system server.
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