Large File Transfer Challenges, How to Solve?

Data transfer has played an important role for enterprises to conduct business with its customers, partners and suppliers while acting as its foundation in mining data value. However, the emergence of the Big Data era has spawned a massive amount of data, while various data types and interactive scenarios have become increasingly complex, the efficiency and security of data transfer is also facing its challenges. If enterprises desire to continue extract value and create opportunities, the foremost priority is to tackle data transfer.

Challenges: Large File Transfer

● While the amount of data has skyrocketed, the transfer efficiency is still poor;

● Data types are diverse and traditional transferring methods are difficult to guarantee its integrity;

● Network environment is complex while the cases of data loss and leakage are increasing;

● Cross-regional and long-distance teamwork has increased, but high latency and high packet loss rate have also become prominent.

The key to solving the challenges above is to find a first-class data transfer engine. This would eminently support enterprises to build a high-speed, secure, and stable environment for data transfer, which brings an edge to lead in a data-driven development.

The Great TCP Bottleneck

Transfer protocol is the foundation beneath every data transfer, in which TCP is the most commonly used IP transport layer protocol. Compared to other protocols, TCP is able to provide a more reliable service for establishing connections between specific network systems and applications.

Originally developed in the early 1970s when networks were still local and data files were small, TCP served as the basic protocol which enabled data to move efficiently and reliably within the local area network (LAN) with very small bandwidth. To maintain this reliability, TCP ensures that the application data transmitted in a single TCP connection arrives at the receiver’s application in the same sequence as when it was sent. Therefore, TCP uses an algorithm to establish the connection between the sender and receiver, creating transfer requests in turn, and splitting the data into packets, which are then sent separately through the network without the need for acknowledgement until reaching its definition limit. (This operation is known as TCP windowing).

The sliding window protocol is used by TCP to define the data buffer. Figure 1 below is a simplified diagram that demonstrates how TCP sends out small packets over the network and how TCP windowing controls how much data can be transmitted without acknowledgement. As the packets are delayed, TCP will then slow down the transfer rate with a smaller window size, which further limits the number of unacknowledged packets allowed.

TCP algorithm is proved to be effective when data transfer occurs over a short distance while the network is not congested. However, when the round trip time (RTT) of packet transfer is inevitably increased by distance, both the performance and efficiency shall be affected. Especially under the scenarios of long-distance, transnational transfer, the transfer of large files and massive small files will expose the drawbacks of TCP protocol:

● Low transfer efficiency, end-to-end transfer requires sequence acknowledgement, the data processing is slow;

● Increase of data loss rate and latency when large files are transmitted;

● Extreme congestion control throttling which results in unnatural throughput loss;

● TCP cannot guarantee its reliability, its file check mechanism is imperfect.

In essence, TCP cannot be defined as a reliable transfer in the true sense of the word. Especially under the pressure of data volume and distant transfer, TCP is unable to guarantee the efficiency of transfer and yet it may expose enterprises to data security threats.

Raysync – A Brand New Transfer Protocol

Raysync’s high-speed transfer protocol is a core transfer technology developed by RAYWING PTE. LTD. based on the UDP transfer protocol. This breakthrough technology does not simply optimize or accelerate data transfer but it takes a leap forward in the transfer technology to completely eliminate the underlying bottleneck while overcoming the limitations of traditional network and hardware. Raysync is able to fully make use of network bandwidth thus provides an ultra-low latency, high speed and end-to-end output service. The transmission rate can be increased by nearly 100 times, achieving over 96% of bandwidth utilization rate while easily adhering to the security, controllability and stability requirements for TB-level large files and massive small files transfer.

Transport Layer: A Black Tech that Overthrows the TCP Protocol

The TCP transfer protocol does provide a reliable data transfer under ideal conditions, but with its fixed throughput bottleneck, a prominent and serious condition would occur due to high packet loss and latency caused by a long-distance network transfer.

Raysync guarantees reliability in the application layer with an innovative method that eliminates drawbacks such as low efficiency in TCP, packet loss, processing errors and unstable transfer rate. To ensure 100% reliability, Raysync adopts the best mechanism that accurately identifies and passes on the actual packet loss condition on the transfer channel.

Application Layer: Best Alternative to FTP

The FTP transfer protocol has been used for more than 40 years, but it is also a fact that the efficiency of FTP file transfer has been far less than the growth rate of data in the face of today's complex file exchange requirements. FTP is even worse in the file management tasks that enterprises urgently need today.

In order to transfer files while maintaining security through FTP, this requires complex scripts, continuous maintenance, and even other applications to assist. All of which may cause time and money losses to enterprises by varying degrees.

Basing upon UDP’s high-speed transfer protocol, Raysync breaks through the bottleneck of large file transfer which satisfy enterprises’ needs by building an intelligent transfer platform that processes and integrates massive data at an unprecedented speed.

Fast, Secure and Reliable Large File Transfer System

With its high-speed transfer protocol, Raysync provides all-around support for enterprises in large file interactions and cross-platform cooperation, achieving standardization within and between enterprises.

Raysync’s intelligent data compression and intermittent transfer technology can also effectively reduce the network load, providing breakpoint resume and data verification to ensure stable and reliable data transfer. The intelligent management system is able to meet the business requirements of enterprises such as data interaction, sync and backup. Raysync makes sure to quickly integrate itself into existing OA, ERP and other enterprise systems, thus effectively reducing R&D costs to achieve data file linkage between business systems and operating system platforms, avoiding data islands.

While Raysync has been continuously improving its file transfer acceleration technology, it also embraces the objectives of solving enterprise file transfer management into its scope of service to a full extent, building a smart file transfer system:

● Data Synchronization

Supports two-way file synchronization that maintains the consistency of data across multiple devices, ensuring no redundant fragmented files are produced and multi-point data sync are efficient.

● Point-to-point Transfer

Adopts user ID to achieve point-to-point transfer, eliminating intermediate transfer for rapid file-sharing.

● Standard Bank-Level Encryption Technology

With the AES-256+SSL+Random salt high-density encryption algorithm, even the developers are unable to recover the root password through the stored ciphertext, making sure the data security is worry-free.

● Audit Trails

Uses transmission logs and operations logs to supervise user behavior, easily trace all operations and file content, effectively control improper usage behavior and help enterprises to achieve better file management.

● User-defined Management

User-defined management perfectly plots out the organizational structure, supporting group management by defining regions, departments, and role-based permissions that set authority to standardize enterprise users' operation.

● Intelligence Nodes Management

With intelligence nodes management equipped, it supports unified management of all node machines in both the internal and external network environment to monitor and collect all operation logs and data synchronously.

● Hybrid Cloud Storage

Raysync supports more than 10 mainstream storage methods including hybrid storage effectively to assist enterprises to store, backup, migrate and synchronize their files in an orderly manner.

Broad Experience in Servicing the Industry

In order to aid enterprises to overcome challenges brought by Big Data, Raysync has been focusing on developing a secure and reliable large file transfer technology and solution with first-class performance for many years. Through continuous technological innovation and real-world applications, Raysync has served across many industries and sectors such as high-end manufacturing, scientific research, life sciences, film and television media, etc.

Film & Media Industry

Challenges:

Most film and television productions are edited and created by people scattered among different firms and overseas institutions, in which a large amount of audio, video, images and other content has to be uploaded and downloaded. This mass amount of data flow has led to low efficiency of file interactions, and the delay of the production cycle may seriously affect the production efficiency.

Solutions:

● Raysync provides the specific audio-visual content transfer solution for the film and media industry to accelerate the transfer of a massive amount of content through Raysync’s ultra-high-speed transfer protocol.

● Intelligently optimize the network bandwidth and effectively reduce the network latency and packet loss caused by transnational and ultra-long distance transfer.

● Build a one-click file sync environment to ensure that all stakeholders can receive the latest and complete media content, this would help the film and media industry to carry out their production work efficiently and smoothly.

IT & Internet Industry

Challenges:

One of the daily challenges faced by the IT & Internet industry is that massive data needs to be backed up synchronously at multiple endpoints. However, due to the tremendous number of large files, the connectivity issues between the transmission service and single file storage server could lead to the inability to fully utilize network bandwidth, instability and data migration issues.

Solutions:

● Raysync applies intelligent distributed transfer to improve the speed of transfer several times and optimize the usage of network bandwidth.

● The Raysync data migration system supports multiple computer clusters for parallel transfer with a maximum transfer efficiency that could reach 100 Gbps.

● Built-in file verification and encrypted transfer technology guarantee end-to-end security, integrity, and consistency of data. This ensures that the whole migration process can be completed in a short time with a 100% success rate and zero failure.

Financial Industry

Challenges:

Most financial institutions expand and develop through their branches, but this often leads to fragmentation of data and application environment. And when "organizational performance" becomes the priority of business development, it is necessary for them to collect a vast number of operation logs and integrate the data to improve the efficiency of business development.

Solutions:

● Raysync’s admin console allows financial enterprises to quickly collect operation logs, monitor transfer logs, manage user groups, configure file permissions, etc. to promote the rapid improvement of its organizational performance.

● In the meantime, the AES-256+TLS encryption algorithm also plays an important role in the whole process, providing top-level security for the financial industry.

Medical & Health Industry

Challenges:

The problem of isolated data islands has long plagued the health industry, potentially hindering the data analysis to improve the overall quality of medical and health services. In the meantime, the issues with transfer and data storage that is directly related to customers’ sensitive data and massive data generated from genetic research have also impeded the development of the medical and health industry.

Solutions:

● Raysync’s large file transfer solution helps to integrate the data across different islands and systems, providing a unified data set for medical and health providers, researchers, and institutions. This is extremely convenient for the stakeholders to collect and analyze data to accelerate the leveraging of Big Data.

● In order to tackle the issues of transferring sensitive data, Raysync adopts standard bank-level encryption and an effective file management system to provide a secure environment for users retrieving the data and the data itself.

With the evolution of information technology continuing at a rapid pace, enterprise data transfer is no longer a simple matter. Especially in such complex market conditions, enterprises should not only consider whether the transfer technology is powerful enough but should also take high-quality service guarantees into consideration when choosing the right solution.

About Raysync Solution

As a one-stop solution provider, Raysync has independently developed its core transfer technology with its professional technical teams to offer high-performance, secure, and reliable large file transfer and file management services for major enterprises.