Enterprises dealing with moving large volume of files (documents, images, videos etc.) over public and private IP networks face challenges such as high cost, unreliable transfer and often very slow transfer of data.
We provide highly scalable and cost-effective solutions to enterprises by leveraging the open source Portal Liferay as front-end user experience platform and Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System as back-end content repository.
The Portals and CMS (Content Management Systems) do offer features to upload large set of files and retrieve securely. Consider a scenario where a specific user needs to upload a huge file (large video with Gigabytes in size) and in large volume (hundreds of images or scanned documents). Typically such operations result in time out and fail, leads to unhappy customers.
Tools such as Aspera are designed to overcome such issues.
About Aspera:
Aspera's fasp™ transfer technology is an innovative software that eliminates the fundamental bottlenecks of conventional file transfer technologies such as FTP, HTTP, and Windows CIFS and dramatically speeds transfers over public and private IP networks. The approach achieves perfect throughput efficiency, independent of the latency of the path and is robust to packet losses.
We have integrated Aspera with Liferay Portal and Alfresco ECM to have reliable and high performance file transfers over public and private networks.
Integration Design:
We have considered web-services based integration between the layers. A custom Liferay portlet is developed to allow users to upload multiple files. We then used Aspera API to upload multiple files to Aspera Connect (Aspera Server). Aspera server is configured to inject the files into Alfresco repository using REST based API.
Benefits:
- Securely transfer files over public and private networks using encrypted file transfer protocols.
- Securely store files using multiple data encryption methods
- No need to worry if destination server is down, Aspera automatically resumes partial transfers and retries failed transfers.
- Transfer of files are many times faster than FTP(Refer: http://www.asperasoft.com/en/technology/fasp_versus_FTP_4/fasp_versus_FTP_4)
- Monitors, tracks and handles failed file transfers
Integration of Aspera with Liferay and Alfresco will defiantly a way to go where we have requirements for transferring large files with maximum network usage.
