IBM Aspera – Direct-to-Cloud Storage
By
The Aspera FASP high speed transport platform is enabled to provide high-performance secure WAN transport of files, directories, and other large data sets to, from and between a number of leading third-party cloud storage platforms. The implementation is an enhanced transport stack and virtual file system layer in the Aspera server software that allows for direct-to-object-storage transfer over the WAN using the FASP protocol and the native I/O capabilities of the particular third-party file system. The stack is available in all generally available Aspera server software products and supports interoperable transfer with all generally available Aspera client software.
Aspera continually adds support for new third-party storage platforms as market demand is demonstrated, and in version 3.4 is pleased to currently support all leading cloud storage platforms including, OpenStack Swift (v 1.12) for IBM Cloud and Rackspace, Amazon S3, Windows Azure BLOB, Akamai NetStorage, Google Storage, and Limelight Cloud Storage. This whitepaper overviews the motivation for the platform – the fundamental problem of transporting large data sets to and from cloud environments – details the platform capabilities, and describes the performance and functionality testing that comprises verification of each storage platform.