Lumen Data Access Accelerator

What if you could execute on data across your WAN like it's your LAN?

This phrase was coined by Lumen to show the incredible potential of this new cutting-edge technology.

The team at VENSEARCH is always looking for new technologies that have the potential to disrupt but enhance organizational workflows. We stumbled on this technology through an impromptu training webinar and were immediately blown away.

Many organizations struggle to collaborate around large data files located in disparate locations, e.g. data centers or remote sites. The ability to work on data with having to download

What exactly is Lumen's Data Access Accelerator (DAA)?

Lumen Data Access Accelerator empowers your enterprise to create operational efficiencies by enabling you to access, analyze, and act upon unstructured data with near LAN performance regardless of distance, unleashing the value of your distributed data assets across secure networks virtually anywhere, anytime. As a global federated data platform for efficiently uniting applications and maximizing compute, storage and cloud, it allows you to execute on data without copying or moving files.

Accelerate time to value - Access geographically dispersed unstructured data sets where it resides without the need to copy data first.
Strengthen data integrity and security - Mitigate exposure to data exfiltration by executing on data where it is originally stored without making copies.
Simplify data management - Streamline your workflow and reduce the time and cost it takes to access files by more than 95% with a solution fully managed and monitored by Lumen.

What industries can utilize the Data Access Accelerator technology?

The simple answer is any industry! There are numerous use cases for Media & Entertainment, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Pharmaceutical, Insurance, & Healthcare industries.

A few general use cases are as follows: (1) Speeding time-to-insight for analytics tools and applications like machine learning and AI (2) Increasing workflow productivity by giving users access to files from virtually anywhere, in near real-time (3) Optimizing user experiences on a simplified, geography-agnostic, remote data access infrastructure

What are the features and specifications?

Fully managed and monitored by Lumen
Location agnostic, scalable and integrated with existing infrastructure
Remote configuration and installation of infrastructure into your enterprise network with option for onsite installation
Hardware and software monitored and maintained through an efficient OpEx model
Global data fabric
Remote Direct Memory Access across WAN bypasses common slow-downs with traditional TCP/IP
Enhanced flow control including buffer credits to provide lossless access to remote data
Packet Loss Recovery minimizes impact of retransmissions
No compression or deduplication required
Parallel files system provides rapid access to data across WAN
Transparent to applications
Integrate infrastructure with existing compute and storage via Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB)
Users connect to their local DAA node via NFS or SMB
Remote storage presented locally through native file management programs via DAA

How does Lumen's Data Access Accelerator compare with Edge Caching?

Remote access of data
DAA allows for real-time access to data anywhere
Edge Caching requires data caching; moving data to edge location adds delays to insights
Infrastructure required for remote access to data
With DAA no additional infrastructure is required: no additional storage!
Edge Caching requires that each location where data is cached requires storage capacity to store data.
Time to first byte
With DAA the time to first byte is based on latency only.
With Edge Caching is dependent on the time to move relevant data to the edit. Example: Moving 10TB of data across a 1 Gbps link at 60+ ms latency > 20 hours.
Write order of Fidelity
DAA allows transparency since applications mount data at edge directly.
Edge Caching requires connection between edge devices to ensure write order of fidelity and file locking. If the site is down, this may cause inconsistencies in data
Consistent Results
With DAA all data is available for processing all the time
With Edge Caching, if all data is not cached, results may be inaccurate. This requires determining what data is required using data management based on tags and metadeta

How does Lumen's Data Access Accelerator compare with WAN Optimization?

Remote access of data
DAA allows for real-time access to data anywhere
WAN Optimization can't accelerate data that has been deduplicated, compressed, or encrypted
Infrastructure required for remote access to data
With DAA no additional infrastructure is required: no additional storage!
With WAN Optimization each location has a caching device as part of the appliance to store hashes
Time to first byte
DAA's time to first byte is based on latency only. This further eliminates TCP delays as distance and latency increase.
WAN Optimization requires data to be moved closer to compute. This doesn't enable real-time access without data mobility.
Access to data over long distance/high latency networks
DAA's value is directly proportional to latency. Higher latency equals greater value.
WAN Optimization is dependent on TCP; value decreases as distance and latency increase. This creates multiple TCP challenges.

How does Lumen's Data Access Accelerator compare with Extreme File Transfer (UDP)?

Remote access of data
DAA allows for real-time access to data anywhere with 95% bandwidth utilization
UDP requires data to be moved closer to compute. This results in improved data transfer rates but only 35% bandwidth utilization
Infrastructure required for remote access to data
With DAA no additional infrastructure is required: no additional storage!
UDP requires data storage at each location when data is being moved closer to compute. This requires creating copies of data and exposes to security risks.
Time to first byte
With DAA the time to first byte is based on latency only.
UDP is dependent on the time required to move data closer to compute. This improves throughput over straight TCP/IP but requires the whole dataset to be moved.
Available scalability
DAA is independent of bandwidth; supports 1, 10, 40, and 100 Gbps networks
UDP is limited to supported bandwidth. As the connection and latencies increase, the performance declines.