WAN and Application Accelerators are great for general purpose acceleration and are fine for streaming and other applications where 100% of a large file must be transmitted. But they simply weren’t designed to accelerate multiple types of file or Binary Large Object (BLOB) data like email, applications and database files. So, if you’re doing collaboration in the cloud, or if you have a sluggish application operating under severe bandwidth constraints, these accelerators can never deliver order-of-magnitude improvements. Instead, they will give you only marginal benefits and barely make a dent in your data transmission costs.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell. First, if only 10% of your file or BLOB has been changed and bandwidth, fidelity and/or latency are problems, why should you replace 100% of it? Second, shouldn’t you be using the best compression technologies available to make even that 10% of your file/BLOB as small as possible? Whether you do collaboration in the cloud, store massive BLOBs, operate a data center or are a mobile/document collaboration provider, the fact is that replacing all the data when you’ve changed only a portion of it is wasteful, inefficient and ineffective—no better or more logical than using a blowtorch to kill an ant.
How did this problem come about? Because Information Transfer is done today the same way it was done decades ago—we call that Information Transfer 1.0 or IT 1.0. Sure, data gets moved faster than previously, but that’s because everybody added bandwidth, put in bigger pipes and focused entirely on creating more room and more speed. The problem is that this massive provisioning solution has major limitations—it’s equivalent to putting a super-expensive, super-powerful rocket engine on the family sedan. The truth is you don’t need to provision at all when you can send all the changed data in one small replacement file.
It’s clear that, in the race for bigger and better, everyone forgot about the data itself—how much of it really gets changed, what does it look like, how can you make it as small as possible, etc. The result is that today bandwidth is expected to be an unlimited, free resource even though everyone knows it’s limited by costly provisioning. The continuing exponential explosion of data in the cloud, and of streaming video and social media, along with the advent of collaboration in the cloud, means that bandwidth alone will never be enough since data growth is outrunning the increase in available bandwidth. Unfortunately, the corporate enterprise (and CIO) is still stuck with provisioning-centric
Information Transfer 1.0, even though it is as outdated as Web 1.0.
That’s why Ironhawk invented a radically different solution to this problem. Instead of replicating and transmitting a huge file or BLOB of mostly unchanged data faster (because plenty of great companies already do that), we focus only on the data that has to be changed and on the transfer itself. We identify where the data has been changed and how it’s been changed. Then we replace only the data that has changed. But we don’t stop there. We examine the changed data, determine the file format, and then optimally compress each type of data based on its file format (.jpg, .pdf, .doc, .xls, etc.) to further minimize bandwidth utilization.
The result: instead of provisioning to accommodate ever more data, Ironhawk SmartSync® radically reduces the bandwidth needed to replace only the changes in data—and does it faster, more cheaply and more efficiently. In turn, this enables lower latency, higher fidelity and better business-critical decisions. How do we do it? With IT 2.0.
Information Transfer 2.0 (IT 2.0) is an entirely new model that Ironhawk developed for data transport and synchronization. It is as paradigm- shifting for data replacement and transfer as Web 2.0 as for the Internet. It is ideally suited for updating and synchronizing changes to much larger files—whether the large file/BLOB is in the cloud or datacenter and whether it’s used for mobile communications, collaboration in the cloud, or customer service; or as input to business-critical decisions.
IT 2.0 is the best practice when three conditions are met: (i) when the total file size is at least an order of magnitude bigger than the changes made to it; (ii) when bandwidth is constrained for any reason—cost, time, or logistics; and (iii) when shortest time, minimum latency and maximum fidelity are business requirements. It turns out that pretty much every update to or synchronization of data in the cloud or the datacenter meets all the IT 2.0 criteria.
SmartSync® is built for IT 2.0, the data world of today, not IT 1.0, the provisioning-based, bandwidth-based world of 20 years ago. It recognizes that most data transfers today involve over 90% unchanged data and 10% or less changed data. That’s the reality when global teams use huge databases for document sharing and project management. To support this new IT 2.0 reality, SmartSync®:
- Moves only the data you change to as many places as you need—even hundreds or thousands of them—and then synchronizes it to ensure a perfect mirror
- Uses advanced compression and transport technologies to minimize the bandwidth needed to transport that data
- Saves massive bandwidth and provisioning costs, and slashes data transport time and costs
- Preserves the fidelity of the data, even when there are unexpected interruptions. The result is true lossless data transmission—delivery is guaranteed even with multiple interruptions because the transfer
seamlessly picks up where the connection was lost, instead of starting over from the beginning
- Improves customer and partner loyalty by slashing latency and increasing reliability in business-critical customer-facing online experiences
- Is the perfect complement to WAN and Application Accelerators because it identifies exactly what has to be changed and feeds only that changed data into the accelerators
- Is the only solution that architecturally solves the problems of slow transit time, low fidelity, high latency and high cost, all of which are incurred when you are forced to transport or retransmit
an entire file/BLOB, not just its smaller unchanged portions. The continuing exponential explosion in data and information mandates an architectural, IT 2.0 solution
- Enables you to deploy applications and use collaboration in the cloud without the problems of bandwidth utilization, performance, reliability and latency
Make Your Organization IT 2.0 Compliant With SmartSync®
If you or your customers deal with massive amounts of data, and you frequently update only small portions of it—and/or you have a bandwidth-constrained environment—IT 1.0 applications and transport systems are wasting your bandwidth, inflating your costs, harming your customer experience due to high latency, and limiting your growth. You need the SmartSync® DCS PlatformTM, the only IT 2.0 compliant solution. Deploy the Ironhawk SmartSync® DCS PlatformTM today. Contact Ironhawk Technologies and start experiencing the performance advantages, cost reductions, provisioning savings, and increased customer loyalty possible only with SmartSync®.
Optimal Criteria For SmartSync®
- A large corpus of data exists, but typical updates to or changes in that data change very small portions of the data
- The updates and changes noted occur frequently, perhaps in real-time, but certainly in near-time
- The updates and changes noted also occur stochastically or, at least, with significant variance even to the extent there is predictability
- The data that has been changed needs to be transmitted to (and reconstituted at) large numbers of locations that are geographically disparate
- The amount of bandwidth available to transmit the data to the locations is suboptimal at best and severely constraining at worst, thereby further slowing the entire operation.
All 5 is a perfect storm for us; but often applying SmartSync® to just 1 or 2 criteria can lead to significant ROI
Web Browser Download Speed with SmartSync®
