FastSoft homes in on small file accleration

FastSoft is upgrading software on its TCP-acceleration gear so it can have an impact on the transfer speeds of smaller files than before.

The 2.0 version of software for its E Series appliances accelerates files down to tens of kilobytes, whereas before it improved the rates for large files of 8MB and larger, the company says.

The new software cuts transfer times by 33% for files that are tens of kilobytes, and by 50% for files that are 1MB to 7MB, the company says.

Before, the accelerators were good for large chunks of data, but the upgrade improves the download times for Web sites and Web applications, FastSoft says.

FastSoft appliances overcome some of the shortcomings of TCP that drastically throttle back transmission rates when acknowledgement packets are too slow to return due to network latency. Using Fast TCP technology, the appliances measure round-trip times for packets, deduce the maximum sending rate the link can support, then adjust the sending rate accordingly.

FastTCP is compatible with standard TCP, and in order to work an appliance must be placed at only one end of a link. The gear competes against products from Array Networks, Citrix, Crescendo and F5 Networks, among others.

In addition to speeding up smaller files, the software offers near real-time monitoring and analysis of how effective the TCP acceleration is for users. By sending part of a flow using TCP and then sending using FastTCP and comparing rates, the device can show the effective acceleration.

The software can graph the speed improvement for traffic that is traveling a given time distance from the appliance, throughput of the box over a given time period and the number of TCP flows over certain time periods.

The new version of software includes license keys for upgrading the throughput of appliances as demand for capacity increases. It also has a new GUI that includes three preset configurations to determine how aggressively FastTCP is applied. Before the device had a custom option in which users configured the device manually and a single preset configuration.