TWO valley companies, Speedera and etouch have teamed up to help the NASA in telescoping its 3000-plus websites into a single portal, improving the portal performance and enhancing capabilities of handling millions of user-access simultaneously. When two unmanned rovers land on Mars, NASA wants to be prepared for a global online rush when the agency for the first time attempts to webcast real-time streaming video from Mars, or any planet for that matter.

After the recent deployment of Speedera’s services, the NASA portal experienced a three-fold improvement in performance. Web page download times are now between 0.8 and 1.0 seconds and NASA has broken into the top ten U.S. Government Web sites with the fastest average performance, as ranked by the Keynote Government Internet Performance Index (KG40).

“Agencies like NASA have realized this comprehensive solution for an integrated portal is needed for bringing order to the chaos of too many Web sites,” says Ajit Gupta, CEO and president of Speedera Networks. “Also, by housing frequently requested content on multiple servers distributed worldwide, Speedera shortens the distance between Internet users and the data they seek in order to improve performance and reliability. By outsourcing the management of the site, the Federal Government can stretch budget dollars in this lean economy rather than spend money on building and maintaining an expensive Web site infrastructure.”

NASA is in the business of space exploration, Gupta continued. “We're in the business of Internet explorers get to their destination fast and reliably.” eTouch, a Fremont-based company, manages the web operations for the site.