Signiant Jet Demonstrates Transfer Speeds of 10 Gbps
Like all Signiant products, Jet is designed to move large data sets far and fast. But for Signiant’s newest SaaS solution, just how fast is fast? In our own tests, we’ve seen Jet capable of transfer speeds that fully utilize a 10 Gbps network, and in some of our initial customer deployments Jet has consistently hit the 5 Gbps mark. The software itself is capable of blazing speeds. Of course, there are system variables outside of Jet that impact transfer speed. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to optimize these variables and get the very best performance from Signiant Jet.
With Jet, Signiant introduced an entirely new patent-pending transport that adds a layer of intelligence to determine how to achieve the highest possible speed in any environment. The software harnesses machine learning capabilities that use historical data and observed network and server conditions to determine the transport parameters that will deliver maximum throughput. The number of streams and the use of Signiant’s proprietary UDP acceleration or TCP are just a couple of the choices that let Jet pick the best option for the conditions.
Compared with single-stream TCP mechanisms (used by most standard transfer software), Jet consistently moves files quickly – regardless of the size of files, or how far they are being sent, or the network conditions under which transfers are taking place. Jet always provides reliably fast delivery.
How to optimize transfer rates
While Jet automatically takes care of much of the work of automating file transfer between geographically distributed locations, there are ways in which you can maximize transfer rates.
Jet transfers are typically constrained by a few primary factors:
• Network bandwidth
• Speed of the storage
• Hardware underlying the SDCX Server software
A low bandwidth connection will often limit transfer speed. Since Jet is used for site-to-site transfers, overall speed can be constrained by the bandwidth at each end of a route. More network bandwidth at both Jet endpoints delivers faster transfer rates.
But even with a fast connection at all sites, Jet still helps achieve greater speeds than alternative solutions. The more bandwidth that is available to Jet, the better it will perform. And Jet will take advantage of the bandwidth it has available without any additional charge (aka bandwidth tax) to use extra bandwidth as networks are upgraded. When using other transfer methods like FTP and rsync, there is no built-in network optimization, meaning that even with fast connections, latency will still cause issues. Without Jet, you’re likely not getting the most out of the investment made in those high bandwidth connections.
Speed can also be hampered by the choice of storage devices. There are many different tiers of storage available but when the performance of local storage doesn’t match the multi-Gbps capability of Jet, transfer rates can slow as files are retrieved from or written to local storage. Jet tries to match the maximum storage speed as closely as possible but customers can also alleviate this bottleneck by upgrading to storage that offers significantly faster read and write speeds.
While network bandwidth and storage read/write speed tend to be the two biggest factors that impact transfer performance, the hardware running the Signiant SDCX Server can also be a limiting factor. The SDCX Server is a piece of software that runs locally to connect your on-premises storage to the Signiant SaaS platform. While your data moves directly from site to site, the SDCX server communicates with the Signiant cloud control plane for management and reporting purposes. The optimal number of parallel transfer streams that can be employed depends on the hardware on which the SDCX server software runs. If the machine’s performance isn’t up to the task, delays can result. For truly high-volume situations, the SDCX Server can be run on multiple servers to share the load. Customers looking to achieve exceptional file transfer speeds with Jet can absolutely meet their goal, if they provide the application with the network conditions that allow Jet to work at its fullest. Ensuring plenty of bandwidth, plus high-performing storage and server machines, will create the environment to hit those multi-Gbps speeds.
