Why AS2 Restart matters for very large file transfers November 11, 2009
Posted by Meg Sewell in MFT, News.Tags: AS2, AS2 Restart, catalog, File transfer, MFT
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Peter Corliss is a Product Manager at Inovis and is responsible for the product strategy and planning, identifying market requirements and defining specific features for our BizManager line of products. He is also a key member of the agile development team for BizManager. Peter recently took out some time to explain the new specification, AS2 Restart.
Q: What is AS2 Restart?
AS2 Restart enables companies to leverage the security and features of the AS2 protocol, while transferring very large files over networks which can be subject to connection timeouts and other failures.
Q: Why is it needed?
AS2 Restart is needed due to the increasing size of data being exchanged over networks. These critical files – often in excess of hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes – can be subjected to inconsistencies within connections, and the time impact of potentially having to resend from start isn’t acceptable.
Q: How was the idea for AS2 Restart conceived and what was the process for creating it?
During the initial round of interoperability testing for Chunked Transfer support as an optional AS2 profile, it was identified that simply chunking data would not be sufficient to overcome the issues with very large file transfers. Inovis played a key role in defining the resulting AS2 Restart feature through submitting initial drafts and helping to refine the final protocol update proposal.
Q: Which companies can benefit from AS2 Restart the most?
As more industries adopt Managed File Transfer applications as part of their integral business practice, the resulting expansion of typical data content into larger and less compressible formats; image-laden catalog data, marketing .pdf presentations, large medical images, and audio/video files are among the types of content that can now more reliably leverage the benefits of AS2.
Q: How will AS2 Restart affect business going forward?
AS2 is already a defacto standard for B2B data transfers. EDI and XML data can now be alongside less traditional data formats which are becoming critical aspects of business communications as network bandwidth, and the size of data crossing over it, continues to increase.
To learn more about AS2 Restart, you may read the press release here.
Comments
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This is a great/simple idea, especially when compared to AS3, which has definitively failed to gain any meaningful adoption. The checkpoint/restart mechanism described in http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-harding-as2-restart-00.txt is pretty simple and affective. I have created a simple prototype – see http://code.google.com/p/babelas2/source/detail?r=13 – just to be 100% that it is actually simple (to implement).