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Larry Chaffin

A conversation with Dan Henderson of Fastsoft.

By Larry Chaffin on Fri, 01/16/09 - 9:16am.

A conversation with Dan Henderson of Fastsoft.  

1. Please tell us about your current position and what you do.

My title is VP Marketing, and I’m responsible for product marketing, business strategy, fundraising. 

2. Tell us about Fastsoft and how it started.

About FastSoft
FastSoft was launched in 2006 to bring the benefits of Internet acceleration to businesses looking to speed the download and distribution of video and other digital content worldwide. Its patented FastTCP technology was developed at The California Institute of Technology’s networking laboratory (Netlab). FastTCP broke world records for Internet speed at the SuperComputing Bandwidth Challenge for four consecutive years.  The company’s patented FastTCP ™ technology updates the leading Internet transfer protocol to enable speed increases of 3–5 or up to 30 times with no technology required on the receiving end.  

3. I would like to first have you tell us what the difference between your product and the Riverbed Steelhead and Cisco WAAS. Do you compete with them?

You can think of FastSoft as the Riverbed for Web applications.  While RVBD and Cisco WAAS reduce IT infrastructure and make your WAN feel like a LAN, FastSoft reduces the need to deploy regional datacenters and makes your Web app feel like it’s local, even though it’s being served from a distance. 

4. What verticals do you see your company in at the moment?

By enabling content to remain centralized as transfer times improve, FastSoft enables leading media & entertainment, content delivery service providers, finance, healthcare, government, technology and other enterprises to increase the value of the Internet for delivering products and services and centralizing global access to digital assets.  

5. Tell me about the ROI that a customer would see from using your product.

Reducing infrastructure – that is, not building a regional datacenter, but instead serving web content from a centralized datacenter.  The “soft” ROI is the increased need for speed that many web applications require, e.g. a better quality of experience – whether it’s a faster video download, HD video, or snappier web application response. 

6. I recently tested the product and saw a results that looked really good. I went from about an hour to download a 175mb file to

3.30 minutes with your product. This was from the same server and off the same network, is this normal?

We typically see speed increases of 3–5 and up to 30 times with no technology required on the receiving end.  

7. Tell me who are your competitors.

We compete with point-to-point file transfer software, digital media management software, and content delivery providers.

 

 

Readers:

If you have Fastsoft installed in your network we would like to hear from you on how it has worked for you and what results you have seen.

Fastsoft

0
By Anon (not verified) on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 9:32am.

Nice blog Larry, I think it would be really nice to go over why this does not compete with Cisco or Riverbed. Also the product works really well, my friend has it in his company and since it is one sided he is using it for customer download of ftp sites, stream media and data transfer to customer where Riverbed and Cisco would not work. This is due to the fact that all of your customers would need an appliance to make those vendors work.

Also I need to speak out on all of the Cisco Olympic NBC WAAS Ads that are on the Cisco Subnet Blog now, Cisco must really the business to be adding them to the site. We all know Riverbed is better than Cisco, they are just wasting money with the ad's. Also we all know that the Cisco WAAS did not help NBC with streaming video transfer from China, they think we are stupid?

Moment of Truth

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By Anon (not verified) on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 8:36pm.

Anon: Your assumption that "Cisco WAAS did not help NBC with streaming video..." is factually incorrect.

I had the pleasure to meet with NBC executives in New York and this was the result I obtained:

Cisco WAAS did in fact accelerate video file transfer between Beijing and New York & Los Angeles. In fact, it accelerated our typical MPEG-4 video file transfer from 6 minutes down to 1 minute and 15 seconds, faster than Riverbed. Other acceleration data can be found in this public case study here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/C36-491479-00_NBC_External_CS.pdf

Without these results, NBC wouldn't have given Cisco the permission to publish this case study, would they? And without a glitch-free acceleration by WAAS during the mission-critical Olympics broadcasting, NBC wouldn't have given Cisco the permission to publish this case study, would they?

Best regards,

Feng Meng
Product Marketing, Cisco WAAS
Cisco Data Center Solutions

Cisco?

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By Anon (not verified) on Fri, 01/16/2009 - 9:13pm.

Make sure you tell people it was not streaming it was just a video file. Riverbed or Juniper would do the same thing.

But Cisco does it better

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By Feng (not verified) on Wed, 01/21/2009 - 2:12pm.

So why didn't NBC pick Riverbed or Juniper?

Because Cisco performed better in the test.

Enough said.

Feng

nothing new

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By Anon (not verified) on Wed, 01/21/2009 - 3:13pm.

There are a ton of other products doing this... FileCatalyst (http://www.filecatalyst.com) for one.

For nothing new

0
By KWatson (not verified) on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 11:45am.

This isn't even remotely like FileCatalyst (or Riverbed, WAAS, etc):
1) NO client software - at all.
2) Not UDP - FastSoft streams 'play nice' with TCP - no corporate sysadmin with a brain would allow a UDP file transfer protocol in their organization unless it was on a bandwidth-managed QOS VLAN.
3) it's not just file transfer, it's any TCP stream.
3) It's a low-level TCP stack/driver packaged as a gateway - not a hungry Java application

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About Putting Realism Into Your Network

Larry Chaffin Ph.D is the Chief Executive Officer/Chairman and founder of Pluto Networks, a Consulting and VAR partner specializing in WAN Acceleration, VoIP, WLAN, Telepresence and Security and a Riverbed reseller. Pluto Networks specializes in the needs of small, large and enterprise companies by always giving them a great ROI on the products they sell. Pluto Networks has a presence in 23 countries around the world enabling all of its consultants to be virtual. Larry was a Judge at Interop for the Best of Interop Awards for 2009 and is looking forward to the 2010 awards in Las Vegas.

Larry has also co-authored all of the books listed below:

Managing Cisco Secure Networks, Skype Me, Practical VOIP Security, Configuring Check Point NGX VPN-1/Firewall-1,Configuring Juniper Networks NetScreen & SSG Firewalls,Essential Computer Security: Everyone's Guide to Email, Internet, and Wireless Security, How to Cheat at Microsoft Vista Administration, Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals, Asterisk Hacking, 2008 VoIP and Video Conferencing, Infosecurity 2008 Threat Analysis and author of Building a VOIP Network with Nortel's MS5100, along with co-authoring/ghost writing eleven other technology books for VIOP, WLAN, security and optical technologies. Larry is currently working on a follow up to Building a VoIP network with Nortel's MCS 5100 Book as well as new books on Cisco Telepresence Networks, Practical VoIP case studies and WAN Acceleration with Riverbed.

Larry also has more than 29 vendor certifications and has been working on many others. Larry has been a principal architect around the world in 22 countries for many Fortune 100 companies designing VoIP, security, wireless and optical networks. He has expanded over time also to include application acceleration. Larry is working with worldwide company now out of Asia as a Special Assistant to the CEO and CIO as they go through organizational and network changes, helping them with strategic advice from his years or experience. Pluto Networks is a channel partner of Cisco, ProCurve, LifeSize, Riverbed, Call Copy, Fastsoft and Symantec.