Aspera Takes Big Data Transferring Solutions to the Cloud with Aspera on Demand

Aspera (News - Alert), Inc. announced on Wednesday at the AWS re:Invent trade show in Las Vegas that it had released Aspera on Demand, a technology platform that transfers big data in cloud environments.

Emeryville, Calif.-based Aspera, Inc. develops solutions for transferring big data over a WAN. The company serves a diverse group of industries like engineering, government, gaming, IT, petroleum and media and developed a proprietary technology known as FASP. The fast, adaptive, secure protocol is used by all of Aspera’s bulk data transfer solutions. According to the company’s website, FASP solutions have performed at the top of numerous WAN benchmark tests.

Aspera on Demand was designed to address the problem of limitations and inefficiencies that many IT departments face with on-premises storage. Companies that purchase their own storage and hardware to meet spikes in demand often find that when demand is low, much of this infrastructure is idle and not providing a return on investment.

Although cloud technology has a bright future and has been embraced by many IT departments, it falls short when companies need to transfer terabytes of data in and out of cloud storage. Traditional WAN methods for transferring data over long distances do not perform well. Shipping disk drives to the cloud service provider depends on nothing bad happening to the drives in transit and the service provider doing the transfer quickly and reliably.

Aspera on Demand is supposed to address these problems. Companies only pay for resources that they use, so there’s no wasting money on idle disk space. FASP overcomes limitations of common protocols like FTP and HTTP and does not have the degradation problems over long distances that typical WAN protocols do. No need to ship disk drives either.

It looks like Aspera on Demand is the proverbial better mousetrap that IT managers sought to address issues with big data transfers. The list of clients using the technology speaks for itself: Amazon, Microsoft (News - Alert), Netflix and the UEFA, a governing body for soccer in Europe to name a few. It solves many problems companies had with big data and the cloud and removes another objection reluctant IT managers have had in making the move to the cloud.