IBM's Aspera Accelerates Movement of Massive Data Volumes Between On-Prem Data Centers and Cloud

Software provider Aspera, an IBM company, announced expanded capabilities for its on-demand data transfer platform for Big Data workloads. The company, which IBM acquired late last year, made the announcement at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam earlier this month.

Data mobility is a difficult problem to solve when dealing with massive amounts of data. Companies in the Big Data analytics ecosystem have taken different approaches to the problem, some working on accelerating movement of data and some finding ways to analyze data in place.

Aspera describes its patented FASP technology as giving businesses the ability to overcome inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research files, over distance.

The company said the latest FASP 3.5 technology will allow any content to seamlessly move across distributed cloud and on-premises systems while meeting fluctuating demands in real time with speed, control and ease. It is integration with all major cloud vendors.

The platform transfers and synchronizes large ultra HD files or millions of small files direct to cloud storage.

To bring cloud scale to its direct-to-cloud storage transfer capabilities Aspera has also launched an Auto-scaling Transfer Platform that automatically scales and expands transfer capacity of Aspera server software in the cloud, providing media companies the ability to expand capacity as needed and leverage the most cost-effective infrastructure.

Michelle Munson, president and CEO of Aspera, said, “Consumers are watching media and streaming videos at unprecedented rates while pushing the limits of content providers’ abilities to meet these rising expectations.”

Aspera also announced a set of FASPStream APIs, which allow live video transport and data feeds over global WANs in real time for near-live production on remote cloud systems. All transfer performance statics are captured by a new scale-out data store for distributed, high-throughput collection, aggregation and reporting.