In several of our past blog entries, we’ve been hammering the fact that not all file transfer solutions are created equal – because there is a difference between what a business needs in a file transfer solution and what a consumer‐focused service or free file hosting service provides (or more accurately, does NOT provide). After a recent test we performed with one of our customers, we (along with the customer) were reminded of these differences and how a non‐enterprise file transfer site will never meet the need of businesses. Let me explain...
 

The Large File Transfer Recipe

If we break it down, there are basically three ingredients to the file transfer equation that determines a successful transfer:

1. How big is the file? (Size)
2. How fast will it get to where you want it to go? (Speed)
3. Did it get to the intended destination? (Reliability)

For the first ingredient, most of the file transfer sites out there are browser‐based tools – you go to the site via your web browser, login to your account if required, and then you take the steps to upload the file to someone. Because it’s purely browser‐based, these sites can only handle files up to 2GB due to an inherent limitation in how the browsers were built. If you work with files larger than 2GB, then these sites won’t do it for you because you’ll get some sort of error or timed‐out message, unless you manually hack up the file into smaller chunks somehow.

For the second ingredient, the speed of the transfer is related to how big the file is as well as the bandwidth connection speed for both the upload (as experienced by the sender) and the download portion (as experienced by the receiver) of the file transfer. Without getting into a long lesson on communication networks, throughput, protocols, latency affects, and network congestion, let’s simply say that large files sent in low bandwidth connections will result in very long transfer periods. Here’s a handy site that calculates the time it takes for a file of a certain size to transfer at different connection speeds.

Lastly, because the size of the file and the connection speed determine how long it will take for that file to transfer, there are a number of things during that time period that can affect whether or not the file was successfully and reliably transferred. In the case where you are trying to send a very large file through a transfer site, you will have to remain connected to that site until the file completely uploads. If your browser, internet connection, or computer gets shutdown (voluntarily or involuntarily) before the upload is completed, you will lose the transfer and need to start over again. Similarly, your recipient will have to remain connected to the site until the file download is completed as well. For extremely large files and connection speeds slower than fiber optic lines, this could take hours or even days.
 

Our Special Sauce For Large Files

So how do we do things differently from many of these rinky‐dinky file transfer sites? First, we offer several ways to transfer extremely large files that are not limited by the 2GB barrier in browsers. You can send super large files via our Desktop Client or email client plug‐ins (Outlook, Thunderbird and GroupWise), which aren’t capped by the 2GB limit because it’s not transferred through a browser. We also have an “enhanced upload and download” feature that enables files greater than 2GB to be uploaded and downloaded within a browser. How can this be? Magic you say? No, just some nifty Java applet we created which circumvent the limit.

Secondly, we reduce the time it takes for large files to transfer with an “accelerated upload” feature in our Desktop Client and email plug‐ins. This is done by maximizing a company’s network speed – our software is configurable to take advantage of load balancers and is able to break up large files into smaller chunks and send via multiple simultaneous streams. You can think of it as changing from a single big‐rig truck traveling slowly in a four lane highway to sending groups of four sports coupes at the same time going the maximum speed allowed.

Thirdly, we make it so that even if a super large file takes a bit of time to transfer, you have the ability to pause, shut down, and resume at a later time from the point you left off, or automatically recover the transfer if the connection was inadvertently broken. This is true for both uploads and downloads.
 

Why Our Sauce Is So Tasty

So what’s the big deal and why was all of this important? Well, at the beginning of the post I mentioned that we did a test with one of our customers, a software firm that needed to regularly upload 5GB ISO files (disk images typically for software) to their clients. Assuming that they found another solution that even enabled them to send files greater than 5GB, they’re able to upload that 5GB file in what normally would take about 8 hours based on their connection speed down to just 40 minutes with our solution! You want proof? Take a look at the screenshot:

You’ll notice that the average speed of the transfer using our Desktop Client with the accelerated upload feature clocked in at 14879 Kb/s, which is equivalent to 14.8 Mb/s (megabits per second with little “b”). With 8 bits to a byte, and 60 seconds to a minute, this equates to 111.6 MB per minute as the average transfer speed. The file being transferred is 4.29GB, or 4290MB. At the speed of 111.6MB per minute, this file would be uploaded in roughly 39 minutes. 4.29GB in under 40 minutes!!

If the ability to handle extremely large files, optimize load balancers for accelerated transfers, and greater reliability for large transfers isn’t tasty enough, we’ve got additional enterprise “flavors” (I’m really going overboard with this recipe thing) such as LDAP/Active Directory integration and other powerful IT administrative features, SAS70 Type II certified data centers, and API and custom command scripting capabilities. LeapFILE has the ingredients to satisfy the real needs of businesses….other consumer‐ish file transfer solutions will just leave you hungry.