The fast proliferation of data creates new challenges that many businesses are only now learning to manage.
The reality is that organisations often work from specific sites where data is stored on dedicated file servers. With the adoption of cloud services, work from home, and the exponential explosion in size and number of files every year, there is now a phenomenon called data sprawl. Data sprawl represents a situation where data is spread across cloud providers, sites, storage platforms, and geographical regions.
At the same time, the pressure of accelerated digitalisation made companies race to streamline data management to enable smoother workflows and cut costs.
In some cases, companies need to copy or move large volumes of structured data without alteration, at very high speeds and across large distances.
In other cases, companies need to move vast amounts of data across continents while meeting critical business SLAs. For example, when a major project is in progress where data is required for successful completion – not having timely access to the data could severely impact the project timelines and cost.
When relocation speed is of the essence, IBM Aspera is the perfect transfer solution. It provides unparalleled speed and security for large file transfers, enabling businesses to be up and running in just a few hours.
Why relocate files with IBM Aspera
IBM Aspera brings flexibility, reliability, security, and speed. Whether companies need to move or copy structured or unstructured data, from multiple sources to multiple locations, from object storage to block storage, block to object, object to object — with Aspera, all permutations are supported. Aspera can move data between all major cloud providers right out of the box, using the wide area network (WAN).
The speed at which you can move will depend on the infrastructure capacity, storage speed, and available bandwidth.
Some examples include:
- 1TB in 2 hours @ 1Gbps
- 5TB in 5 hours @ 2Gbps
- 10TB in 4 hours @ 5Gbps
- 100TB in 21 hours @ 10Gbps
Aspera can guarantee high-speed over long distances. Most data relocation software providers do not have a way of accelerating transfers, making their performance subpar even across a continent, let alone cross-continent.
No TCP bottlenecks
TCP-based protocols, which are used by most other transfer solutions, are not fit for long-haul data transport.
For example, have you ever had your internet connection grind to a halt because you started a full backup? Aspera will ensure that never happens. Aspera’s FASP protocol ensures fair usage of your bandwidth. With Aspera, the network and disk congestion control provide an automatic adaptation of transmission speed. Through Aspera’s dynamic rate control, transfer rates adapt to the available network bandwidth and storage bandwidth.
No need for throttling
In TCP-based transfer solutions, the congestion avoidance is poor and, in some conditions, can lead to network overdrive. To compensate for this, some solutions will have you manually throttle your transfers. With Aspera, there is no need for throttling. The FASP protocol allows you to set your expected rate while the protocol handles the rest, with no user intervention.
Interoperability
Storage providers often limit their support for data movement or copy to another of their devices, and cloud providers don’t usually help move your data to another provider. However, Aspera can transfer your data between disparate storages, providers, operating systems and hardware solutions. Furthermore, some software cannot run natively on the host machines but instead require a separate machine to act as data movers. Aspera does not rely on any caching servers; rather, it offers direct read/write with object storage using native APIs of the object storage.
With Aspera, you can use data relocation as a service, use your own systems, or combine the two. If using Aspera as a service, all you need to do is connect your cloud storage to prepare for high-speed data movement between any supported location. Data movement can flow from multiple sources to multiple destinations, in a collect and merge, or collect and distribute scenario.
Automatic scalability
When moving large files across large distances, companies should consider to what degree the software or service can scale automatically. Additionally, it’s helpful to check if the service offers a way to parallelise the transfers to leverage storage that lends itself well to parallelisation, such as clustered file systems. When dealing with vast volumes of data – perhaps many small files – huge performance gains can be achieved by parallelising the data transport. This happens by splitting the transfer into multiple streams that flow across multiple servers. The Aspera Transfer Service automatically scales according to demand and can deliver multi-Gbps performance between supported cloud providers.
Keeps your data synchronised
Another potential challenge when relocating data is keeping the data synchronised across disparate systems. Aspera allows you to quickly perform a live file-level synchronisation before cutting over to the new location. Aspera offers a mechanism that will enable you to set up very high-rate scanning of large file sets distributed across multiple host machines. This leads to fast identification of file candidates across multi-terabyte and multi-petabyte file sets that require synchronisation. Additionally, with Aspera, you can tune the scan intensity to protect your storage.
Security
Aspera enables companies to transport files with high security while using the public internet. The software brings the added benefit of encryption-at-rest to keep your files encrypted when they are relocated, which you can decrypt en masse or on-the-fly at a later stage.
Monitoring
Monitoring your high-speed file movements is essential. Aspera lets you monitor all your data movement in real-time, giving you a helicopter view of your transfers and enabling you to drill down into any issues you may encounter for fast resolution.
Reach out to Dot for help
The Dot Group are the Aspera experts, enabling you to do long-haul data relocation efficiently and intelligently. We’ve accumulated many years of experience with high-speed bulk data relocation and IBM Aspera so that we can hold your hand through the process. Connect with Dot to discover how you can move data to best fit your requirements.