Asankya claims 40x jolt to Internet traffic

Atlanta-based Asankya Inc. announced that its "parallel networking algorithms," which send bi-directional data across multiple paths over the Internet, can increase the performance IP-based applications by 40 times.

Wow.

Company chairman Patrick Harr tells me that Asankya will offer its technology in a software as a service mode, appropriately enough, so you don't have to invest capital in pricey gear to juice performance. Harr, who joined Asankya in April from cloud-storage vendor Nirvanix, says the service will be formally unveiled later this month.

He explains that the as-yet-unnamed service breaks up a file into 10 pieces and sends each segment along a separate path that has been monitored for performance status. The service picks the top 10 paths for performance and reliability for the data to reach a given destination.

"We make the public Internet look like a private, dedicated leased line," Harr boasts.

By breaking files into 10 parts for transmission, there's the added benefit of eliminating the threat of man-in-the-middle attacks. More importantly, Harr says, it accelerates encrypted data, adding virtually bullet proof security.

I wrote about Asankya's hypermesh technology, as it's called, about a year and half ago and am pleased that the company is continuing to build on the work of its co-founder, Georia Institute of Technology professor Ragupathy Sivakumar, who was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Pleased because many Internet services are hobbled by the laws of physics that prevent some apps being deployed in the cloud because of performance limitations. The way service providers have been getting around those physical limits is by building data centers around the globe so end users can get decent response times. That's expensive. And users pay for that extra expense.

Asankya's breakthrough has the potential for cutting service providers' costs, which are already very competitive as a rule, especially in the area of online storage.

But it's even more important for IT shops that are considering building their own private cloud for globally distributed users. Asankya's technology can hold down the costs of deploying cloud-based services while keeping performance SLAs in place.

If Asankya's service works as advertised when it goes live in a few weeks, it could be the biggest news to hit the SaaS and cloud-based services market since Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com a decade ago.

Like I said: Wow.