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Data transfer protocol facilitating global data access and collaboration.
Software engineers Michelle Munson and Serban Simu , the co-founders of Aspera in Emeryville, California, both worked in application-level networking since leaving graduate school, and were exposed to the problem of transporting data over wide area networks (WANs) early in their careers.
"We'd worked on related areas, particularly in transferring digital media content, and knew there was an unsolved problem," says Munson. That problem boiled down to: Why doesn't the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) work well for moving bulk data over WANs? And what were the alternatives?
"We didn't originally set out to make a transport, as we'd assumed there'd be open-source technologies for reliable transfer," says Munson. Indeed there are, but Aspera, a bootstrapped company with roots in Munson's garage, argues that the performance of its commercial software outstrips the open-source alternatives (see, "We Can't Fix the Internet"). Munson claims that the typical increases in speed experienced life sciences companies based on network capacities and bottlenecks range from 10-fold to 100-fold.
When Munson and Simu investigated the alternatives for high-speed data transport, they found that none of the available transport approaches held up. TCP is a reliable transport protocol that powers FTP, HTTP, CIFS and NFS, SCP and RSYNC, among others. But given the fundamental problems of TCP over networks with high round-trip time and packet loss, which severely limits the speed of large data transfer over WANs, Munson and Simu set out to engineer a new protocol that did not have any artificial bottlenecks under WAN conditions.
The pair was able to forego any external investment or venture capital because of early customers that allowed the company to grow software around the technology. The first two types of companies to test our technology and put us over the edge were affiliated with the Department of Defense [DOD] and media/entertainment." (The DoD connection was somewhat serendipitous, and came from Munson knowing a then small contractor in DOD intelligence that was having difficulty transporting data over networks.)
About two years ago, the genomics /life sciences community discovered Aspera, becoming the firm's third key vertical market- particularly in the field of next-generation sequencing (NGS).
Each vertical has its own issues, but Munson says the problems...