IBM closes acquisition of Aspera, which speeds the transfer of secure files

IBM has announced it has completed the acquisition of Aspera, Inc., a privately held company that securely speeds the movement of massive data files around the world. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aspera’s patented technology accelerates the secure transfer of large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent, says an IBM news release, potentially reducing a 26-hour transmission of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. This speed is achieved by Aspera’s patented fasp protocol, which breaks the bottlenecks inherent in broadband networks to deliver high performance, efficiency and security in the most difficult WAN environments. This also gives customers a more efficient way to transport data to and from cloud networks.

Traditional network protocols limit the speed and reliability of moving Big Data to where it is needed most. Large data transfers can take hours or days by traditional methods and can be compromised by security issues. These barriers impede organizations across a wide range of industries, from a clinical research group needing to access complex genomic research stored across several cloud services around the world, to a production studio trying to quickly transmit a hit movie to a popular video streaming service.

“Often replacing the costly shipment of hardware equipment from remote locations, back to bases and facilities in the US, Aspera software allows for secure, reliable and ultra high-speed archival of intelligence data, directly from the points of capture,” explains Aspera on its own Web site. “For example, Aspera fasp is a key technology driving a mission-critical operation for the DOD that transfers multiple Terabytes of data daily from multiple war theater locations back to analysis centers in the eastern U.S. over high speed satellite networks. Each satellite link is fully utilized by a single Aspera transfer running continuously at 130 Mbps. The deployment replaced multi-million dollar flights of physical hard drives, and even more important, brings the data back many times faster for immediate analysis.”

Licensed to clients and partners in the cloud or on premise, Aspera delivers the industry’s fastest transmission speeds over any network link regardless of file size, transfer distance or network conditions. Aspera provides these Big Data transfers with bandwidth control, predictability and security, including the encryption of files in transit or at rest.

“Aspera solves critical challenges at the intersection of two of the most influential trends driving business today — Big Data and cloud computing,” said Craig Hayman, general manager of industry cloud solutions at IBM. “With this acquisition, IBM will help our customers more effectively and efficiently move large files to and from the cloud and within the enterprise to where individuals can extract real business insights from that data.”

Aspera makes cloud computing even faster, more predictable and more cost effective for Big Data transfers such as enterprise storage, sharing virtual images or bursting to the cloud for increased computing capacity. Its fasp technology is licensed to many leading cloud computing services and will be integrated with IBM’s recently acquired SoftLayer cloud infrastructure later this year.