IBM Aspera

Control IBM Aspera Bandwidth Consumption and Optimize All of Your Applications with Silver Peak

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.

Featured Products

  • VX WAN Optimization Software

    VX Virtual WAN Optimization Software

    Silver Peak VX WAN optimization software supports the full list of Silver Peak WAN optimization features. Use Silver Peak VX software to build a Silver Peak Unity WAN fabric for integrating your enterprise WAN, the Internet and the cloud, and to optimize every SaaS application.

  • NX WAN Optimization Appliances

    NX Appliances for Application Acceleration and Replication Acceleration

    Silver Peak NX WAN optimization appliances are the industry's highest-performance WAN optimization solutions, delivering three-times the WAN performance and capacity of the nearest competing products. Silver Peak Software for Life program means you can convert NX appliances to VX software at anytime for free.

  • Unity Architecture: Building an SD-WAN Fabric

    Silver Peak Unity is the premier solution for broadband and hybrid WANs.

  • SaaS Optimization

    SaaS optimization for every SaaS application.

  • Cloud Networking

    Silver Peak Unity extends the enterprise network to the cloud.

Benefits

  • Avoid or delay expensive WAN bandwidth upgrades by de-duplicating data across all applications.
  • Prevent Aspera from interfering with other applications through advanced traffic shaping and quality of service (QOS).
  • Protect data in transit whether moved by Aspera or any other application through an AES-256, VPN.
  • Choose any transfer tool and realize throughput gains with Silver Peak’s optimization technologies.

Resources

  • IBM Aspera dramatically shortens bulk data transfers, but often at the expense of other enterprise challenges. Excess data is sent across the wide area network (WAN), delaying file delivery and increasing WAN costs. The performance of other applications sharing the network frequently suffer. Customer testing shows that Silver Peak shortens bulk data transfers by 75 percent and more and eliminates about 50 percent of IBM Aspera from the WAN. With Silver Peak, organizations can use virtually any standard data transfer tool and match the performance expected from IBM Aspera while improving every other application and cloud service on their network.
  • This is a demonstration of Silver Peak VX virtual WAN optimization software accelerating remote file transfers (CIFS) between a data center and a remote branch office.
  • Users in branch offices and remote offices have traditionally had a difficult time accessing files stored in remote data centers. The Windows file system relies on CIFS/SMB a chatty protocol that performs poorly over the WAN. Silver Peak corrects CIFS chattiness, accelerating the transfer of data to the branch office or remote office. This document explains how Silver Peak enable centrally managed file services to dramatically improve branch office and remote office productivity.
  • Architecture design firm dwp has adopted a WAN optimisation system from Silver Peak to accelerate file transfers and reduce infrastructure costs by 80 percent. The platform, Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA), is now able to speed up transfers of AutoCAD-based files from days to minutes. According to dwp, it now takes only a few minutes to transfer 1 GB of data across the distributed enterprise, which includes 12 locations across Asia Pacific and the Middle East. There was an urgent need for dwp to lower its operating expenditure (OPEX) costs, which soared dramatically due to an increase in bandwidth costs necessitated by poor network connectivity between its data centre located in Bangkok and the various branch offices. In addition, link costs and latency were the highest between Bahrain and Bangkok.
  • Autodesk, Inc. is a world leader in 2D and 3D design and engineering software for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets. Since its introduction of AutoCAD® software in 1982, Autodesk has developed the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art software applications to help customers experience their ideas digitally before they are built. Fortune 1000 companies rely on Autodesk for the tools to design, visualize and simulate their ideas to save time and money, enhance quality and foster innovation for competitive advantage.