Aspera Releases New Transfer Platform

Aspera has introduced version 3.6 of its Aspera Transfer Platform that is built into the core of all its latest products and Aspera On Demand offerings. In what it calls “one of our biggest releases to date,” its core products — Enterprise Server, Connect Server, Point-to-Point Client and Desktop Client — have all undergone a revamping with support for multi-tenancy and many new features and capabilities. The most significant highlights include:

• New multi-tenant access control and content security enabling multiple Aspera applications to securely authenticate to transfer clusters and individual transfer nodes with no access to underlying storage credentials, supporting all local and cloud storage types.

• New super fast HVM images for Aspera On Demand running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure support single transfers sessions at up to 1.5 Gigabits per second throughput using the latest VM technology.

• Many new direct-to-cloud storage advanced transfer capabilities available for on demand support of all major cloud storage providers including IBM SoftLayer Swift, AWS S3 and GovCloud, Microsoft Azure Blob, Akamai NetStorage, Limelight Orchestrate Cloud Storage, Google Cloud Storage, HDFS, Ceph and coming soon, CleverSafe.

• New server side encryption at rest stores content securely at rest based on server defined/queried secrets, in addition to client side encryption at rest.

• New Autoscale service for the Transfer Cluster Manager (ATCM) for Aspera On Demand that automatically scales the number of Aspera server nodes for client transfer demands up and down based on user-defined policies.

• New Aspera Watch (asperawatchd) service provides immediate change detection and snapshot service designed for speed, scale and distributed change watching.

• New FASPStream binary and APIs include a new binary for sending and receiving “streams” of data or growing files over wide area networks at the stream/file generation rate with nearly 0 delay at the receiver.

• New ascp4 binary has a new architecture for ultra high-speed transfers of very small files, able to achieve 1 million files per minute over Global WANs for 10 Gigabit per second sustained transfers of files of <=100KB over long distance.

• New Aspera Sync incorporates the asperawatchd service eliminating bottlenecks of scanning on very large file systems (>20 million files) and scales with number of synchronizing users by eliminating per-user file system access.

• New Aspera WatchFolder (beta release) included in all Linux and Windows core products and designed to meet the scaling and management requirements of modern workflows. This can be used in place or in addition to the Windows asperasync.exe or simplesync services on Linux.