File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Don’t let distance degrade your FTP performance. Silver Peak dramatically improves FTP performance, eliminating more than 85 percent of FTP data from the WAN and shortening file transfers with FTP by more than 70 percent. Users retrieve files faster, FTP backups complete sooner. With Silver Peak, FTP performs as well across the globe as it does across the office.

Many companies deploy centralized FTP file servers to lower costs and improve management. But as FTP operates over distance, it may become slow and unpredictable. Limited bandwidth coupled with high latency, packet loss, and TCP delays that typify many WANs adversely impact FTP performance. Silver Peak overcomes FTP limitations over the WAN, shortening FTP file transfer times. More than 85 percent of FTP data can be eliminated from the WAN. Data reduction, coupled with the Silver Peak’s ability to overcome congestion and latency, shortens FTP transfers by more than 70 percent. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges: :

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak’s  byte-level deduplication  removes redundant FTP data from the WAN. FTP transfers are faster, and more than 85 percent of FTP data is removed from the WAN. The first time FTP sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance.  
• Latency – Silver Peak  mitigates latency  enabling FTP to operate more efficiently over distance.  TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Where FTP shares the network with Windows applications or CIFS/SMB, organizations benefit from  CIFS Acceleration , which includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and through Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.
• Congestion – Silver Peak makes FTP performance more predictable across congested WANs. Lost packets are reconstituted in real-time at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple round-trip retransmissions. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak protects FTP data in-flight between locations with an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) running AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest is also encrypted with AES. End-to-end encryption is provided by SSL/TLS.

Silver Peak offers the most scalable and cost-effective data acceleration software for connecting data centers, remote offices and the cloud. You can download and deploy it  as a free, self-service trial in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your organization.