You're probably familiar with the concept of data gravity, even if you’ve never heard the term before. The emerging term and its concept are becoming increasingly popular as file sizes continue to grow at exponential rates, and cloud storage popularity becomes mainstream. This session will introduce the concept of data gravity, the factors at play, and how file transfer will play a role in the future.

1. Introduction to Data Gravity
By: John Tkaczewski
President of FileCatalyst
March 4, 2015

2. Data Gravity
• A term first coined by Dave McCrory circa 2010
• Data is difficult to move around
• Data attracts greater and greater amount of
Apps, Services and other tools as it grows

4. Why is the data “stuck”?

5. Throughput and latency
• As throughput and latency to the Data increase, the gravitational pull
of the data mass also increases
• Which forces the apps and services to move closer to the data

6. If the model stopped here… all apps and
services would end up in a single giant online
BLOB (the cloud) to be closer to the data

7. There are other forces that keep some data away…

8. Forces that push away
• Privacy
• Security
• Cost
• Features, Convenience

9. There is a balance between the gravity
and the “Forces that push away”

10. Real Life Scenario
USB Thumb Drive VS. Amazon S3
• Unlimited flexible
growing storage
• Easy Sharing with
the rest of the
world
• Security
• Convenience
• Fast Access to Data
• Practically Free
• Can be physically
moved

12. Data Gravity on the Cloud
• Make inbound data as light as possible
• Make outbound data as heavy as possible
• Cost in VS. cost out
• Make Context of the data proprietary (example of
a picture on flickr from http://datagravity.org/)

13. Data Gravity as a computational theory
• Borrows from gravitational theory
• Similarities with the way nations negotiate trade tariffs and
trade agreements between countries and cities (ref)
• Shannon’s law how much information can be squeezed down
a wire
• Von Newmann Bottleneck, how fast the data can move from
Persistent Storage to Memory to CPU cache to CPU

14. How does accelerated file transfer fit
in all of this?

15. Traditional File Transfers
FTP, SFTP, HTTP, WebDav, SMTP, CIFS etc…
• All use TCP
• Provides reliability, error checking, ordered packets in a stream
• Congestion control built in
• Internet could not survive without it
• Works well for most internet traffic, email, web browsing small ad-
hoc transfers

16. Problems with TCP
• Flow control limits transmission window, causes dead air with high latency
• Very aggressive in response to network congestion, cannot tune in
application layer
• Result is less than ideal performance on wireless, satellite, or long haul
links
• Can be tuned but still not ideal for many-one, one-many

17. File Transfer Acceleration
• Ideal for bulk file transfer
• Predictable - Can send at a perfect rate
• Not affected by latency or packet loss
• Congestion Control implemented in application layer
• Tunable congestion control aggression
• Instantly detect link capacity

18. Overall the effects of Data Gravity
are reduced
(like Anti-Gravity)

20. • Data gravity still exists but is reduced by
eliminating the latency component
• The gravity continues to exist towards
every storage location
• With faster moving data, the owner can
now have more choices where to store it.

22. Cloud growth vs. geographical location of the users

23. • It’s not always possible to make cloud services
available near the all the users
• File Transfer Acceleration can help to reach
those far away users at a lower cost then
building a new data center

24. Future …
• Cloud services will continue to expand (money maker)
• Local and personal storage will continue to be needed
but merely as a cache to what’s on the cloud
• Throughput will continue to increase but the latency
will stay the same (speed of light++ anyone??)
• The need for faster file transfers will continue to grow
as the cloud, data and links get bigger.

25. Thank you.