IBM Aspera

Silver Peak customers have reduced Aspera bandwidth consumption by more than half, and used Silver Peak’s comprehensive optimization technology to ensure all applications perform their best over distance.  Silver Peak helps Aspera be more efficient while giving IT explicit control over network resources that are shared between Aspera and other applications. 

IBM Aspera is a popular file transfer utility that replaces standard TCP with its FASP protocol and relies on its own algorithms to recover lost packets. In addition, Aspera provides users with detailed statistics and management capabilities over file transfers. While effective at transferring bulk data, Aspera faces a number of challenges in the enterprise:

• Large and sometimes costly wide area network (WAN) or Internet connections are often needed to move large volumes of data with Aspera.
• Aspera competes for bandwidth with other applications that are sharing the network, potentially adversely impacting other business processes.
• Aspera is typically one of many applications employed in an enterprise.  All of the other enterprise applications that need to transfer data over distance do not benefit from Aspera.

Silver Peak optimizes the delivery of data over distance for every application. Silver Peak customers who deployed with Aspera have reported bandwidth reductions of Aspera traffic of more than 50 percent.  Less bandwidth usage means reduced WAN costs and more bandwidth available for other applications. (These numbers are indicative; actual deduplication performance will depend on the dataset’s characteristics and other factors.) Organizations who have not yet chosen Aspera may find that they can gain the performance efficiencies required with Silver Peak and standard file transfer mechanisms like FTP, HTTP or CIFS file sharing.

Silver Peak also addresses numerous areas untouched by IBM Aspera. By explicitly managing aggregate WAN bandwidth, all applications perform better with Silver Peak. Streaming video and real-time data benefit from Silver Peak’s ability to choose the path with the least loss and overcome the effects of network congestion in real-time. Specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges of moving data over distance:

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak’s byte-level deduplication removes redundant data from the WAN. By detecting repetitive byte-patterns across all applications, not just bulk data transfers, Silver Peak can reduce Aspera bandwidth consumption. The first time Aspera or any other application sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests for the same or similar data are fulfilled based on deltas relative to data stored in the local Silver Peak instance, reducing bandwidth consumption.
• Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enables applications to operate more efficiently over distance. TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. CIFS Acceleration 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 application performance more predictable across congested WANs. This is particularly important for streaming data and real-time applications who are sensitive to lost and out-out-of-order packets. Lost packets are reconstituted using error correction information 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 all 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 within Silver Peak instances 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.