With adding a layer of reliability on top of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) some open-source providers such as UTP, Tsunami, UFTP and GridFTP and other “expressive” providers such as Aspera, FileCatalyst or Signiant that were discussed in one of our previous blog articles step into the gap providing services for organizations that are relying on fast transfer of big data sets such as media companies, gaming platforms, scientific organizations and other big companies and enterprises (http://www.atomrain.com/it/it/aspera-filecatalyst-signiant-fast-data-transfer).
In this article, we discuss a few open source side options to consider for fast data transmission.
UDT, Tsunami and UFTP are dependable UDP-based application level data transport protocols used for distributed data intensive applications.
This software is designed for extremely high speed networks. It supports global data transfer of terabyte-sized data at a much higher speed than TCP and is core technology in many commercial WAN acceleration products. It allows user-defined congestion control algorithms and modifications.
Compared to the services paid for, there are several issues:
- No installer and no binaries are available
- Servers have to be built from source
- No user authentication, reporting, monitoring
- File management to be implemented by the programmer
- No Firewall transversal
- Low security (only UFTP provides encryption during data transfer)
- No multi-threading limiting the number of simultaneous connections
- Poor performance on high packet loss
- Low bandwidth links
- Default configuration highly susceptible to packet loss
- No built-in automatic retry
- Limited congestion control
- No graphical client interface for point-to-point transfers
The GridFTP protocol is based on FTP and is higher performing, secure and more consistent open-source protocol for large-size data transfer.
It’s also only optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks and achieves much greater use of bandwidth by allowing multiple simultaneous TCP streams.
GridFTP shares several of the weaknesses of the open-source UDP-based protocols but is better equipped with functionalities including multi-threating, encryption, secure user accounts, support of packet loss and others (see table below for comparison to other protocols).
What data transfer provider to use?
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In summary, if you are looking for a stable, secure and high-performing data transfer protocol without the hassle for huge-set up, you have to go to the paid versions – as most big organizations do.
However, if you cannot effort those and need an open-source provider use GridFTP and set it up yourself if you have the skill-set to implement the command-line interface (CLI).
