Speeding Up Data Access for Our Customers

With global collaboration on the rise, we’re seeing an increased demand from enterprise customers to share and exchange files with their counterparts around the globe. At Egnyte, we’re continuously testing different ways to decrease data access time for our users, and we’ve had to address many roadblocks along the way due to the nature of public networks.

Shared public networks are susceptible to various problems that include ISP throttling, inefficient routing, and congestion. Although many of these aspects are beyond our control on public networks, we worked to increase data delivery speeds and provide faster service to our customers.

This wasn’t a simple process, but we quickly realized that the only way to effectively solve this problem was to move as close as we could to the customer and minimize the shared public network between our users and their files on Egnyte. Our goals for this process included:

• Provide an Egnyte managed endpoint that is close to the user to terminate the connection over the public network
• Replicate user documents to different offsite locations across the globe so users can access the copy closest to them
• Keep a document copy geographically closer to users for faster downloads from the same region

Here is the solution we developed to achieve these goals:

1. Deployed a global Egnyte managed network POP (Point of Presence) across regions with a large user base. These network POPs are connected with fast private links to Egnyte’s data centers.
2. Set up geo-aware DNS names and leveraged Egnyte’s home-grown software defined network to route user connections via their closest network POP based on their origin.
3. From the network POP, we routed the user connection to Egnyte’s source data centers over private links.
4. We then fetch the closest off-site document copy (when available), instead of downloading it from the source data center
5. With these changes, the network POP doubles up as an early SSL termination endpoint for remote users, thus reducing response times.

We looked at our user base across regions and deployed network POPs in Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Out first batch of network POPs are located in the following areas:

1. U.S. Central2. U.S. East3. U.S. West4. EU5. South America6. APAC

We’ve also partnered with several ISPs and data center providers to hook these network POPs to our source data centers with fast private links, thus eliminating common problems seen with long-distance public network routing. For our enterprise users who have network POPs enabled, we’ve seen a tremendous improvement in transfer speeds of up to 125 Mbps for key regions in the U.S. and EU, and up to 50 Mbps in Asia.

Leveraging Egnyte’s presence in multiple data centers across regions, coupled with globally-distributed network POPs at half a dozen locations, we’re able to provide much faster transfer speeds to our users. Stay tuned for more news in this area, like geo-routing uploads and deploying more network POPs near you.

Sachin Shetty is an architect at Egnyte spending most of his time on the Object Store platform and object delivery to users around the world.