Transport Matters

Notes on Signiant Transport Performance

Signiant is very proud of our transport performance and efficiency. We have conducted numerous tests in lab environments and also in customer networks and we stand behind our performance. Below are a few interesting things customers should understand when purchasing Signiant or any other file acceleration software:

  • Speed - with latency up to 500 ms and packet loss up 2%, Signiant Media Agents can achieve up to 95% throughput and 100% utilization on an IP network. The 5% difference is overhead made up of packet headers, acknowledgements etc.
  • For example, on an OC-3 link (155 Mb/s) Signiant can achieve 148 Mb/s throughput.
  • Another example, on a Gigabit Network Signiant can easily achieve 90% + throughput with 100% network utilization.

Bandwidth Efficiency

  • Flexibility - Signiant transfers adapt to work in almost any IP network environments: UDP, TCP or HTTP. It's automatic. The Signiant Media Agents will determine the best protocol to ensure end to end performance, security, file check-pointing/restart and all of the standard transport features regardless of protocol.

  • Signiant software can run on dedicated hardware or can reside with other applications. This provides flexibility allowing customers to utilize existing hardware. Our software is designed to share the hardware resources and the network. However, if a customer decides to install Signiant on a dedicated server, we will take full advantage of available processor power, memory and network bandwidth to deliver optimum performance.

  • Signiant software can run on hardware from low end PCs to high end enterprise servers but if the disc systems cannot read/write fast enough to keep up with Signiant, they become the bottleneck. Therefore, disk type, quantity, I/O systems and Operating Systems can impact overall transport performance.

  • Similar to disc performance, the network efficiency gained by using Signiant can be limited on lower end processors or machines with limited memory. Signiant efficiency will push the speed envelope.

  • Resiliency - Signiant software is designed for large file transfers common in the media business. If there is a network disruption or failure, Signiant will recover. Signiant will resume transfers and pick up a file where it left off. Unlike most FTP implementations, it will not start over. This is critical when moving large files across a network.

What our customers are saying...

"A typical dubbing reference package is roughly 10 GB. With Signiant, we were seeing speeds of less than thirty minutes around the world, which is huge - nobody else can touch that right now."

Ron Horwitz, Vice President & General Manager, Deluxe