Acceleration
Signiant’s Core Acceleration Technology
Each of Signiant’s four products leverages our core acceleration technology, which improves on standard Internet transmission speeds up to 200 fold and is increasingly impactful with longer distances, higher bandwidth and more congested networks. As illustrated in the chart below, Signiant’s performance is incrementally faster compared to TCP-based protocols like FTP as latency and bandwidth grow.
“UDP Acceleration”
The kind of technology we’ve developed to speed file transfers is often called UDP (user datagram protocol) acceleration. But the phrase doesn’t quite capture it. “UDP acceleration” is really just industry vernacular based on one small detail of the implementation, and doesn’t convey the depth of innovation involved.
What we’ve actually done is implement both an advanced transmission control protocol on top of UDP as a replacement for TCP, and an advanced file transfer protocol as a replacement for FTP. But, before we get into these improvements, let’s discuss how TCP, UDP and FTP — all original members of the Internet protocol suite — traditionally work.
Scale Out Transfers to the Cloud
When moving large files and big data sets to the cloud, another solution commonly used to overcome the limitations of traditional TCP is to run multiple TCP streams in parallel. While this does improve throughput, improvements diminish exponentially with each added TCP stream. That said, a significant benefit of running multiple TCP streams in parallel isn’t aggregating possible throughput, but rather spreading the transfer across multiple servers (scale out vs. scale up).
Signiant Flight uses “UDP acceleration” on multiple parallel streams to get the advantages of scaling out provided by spreading the load across multiple machines instances. The latest generation of Flight technology can be inserted into any standards-based HTTP transfer to transparently replace each TCP stream with an accelerated UDP stream. This all adds up to a cloud-native, scale-out architecture that facilitates multi-gigabit throughput when communicating with any cloud service in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Storage.