Microsoft Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy, scale, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft data centers. You can build applications using multiple languages, tools, and frameworks.

Moving data into cloud storage presents challenges for organizations across all industries, and finding a tool that can move data to the cloud as fast as possible is one of the challenges. This is because of a barrier in place stopping users from utilizing the high bandwidth available to them. That barrier is the traditional FTP and HTTP-based solutions used to transfer files across the WAN. Furthermore, these solutions cache files locally and copy them into the cloud as a background process, creating the illusion of speed.

FileCatalyst has the ability to accelerate transfers into Azure Blob storage at multi-gigabit speeds. FileCatalyst Direct writes data directly to Azure Blob storage, allowing the data to be streamed directly without caching. With FileCatalyst, file transfer acceleration is achievable regardless of size, file format, or transfer distance.

Adding an Azure Blob storage account to FileCatalyst a is an easy process. Simply install FileCatalyst on your virtual machines (VM) that will send files to Azure Blob storage. Adding your Azure Blob storage to FileCatalyst requires only an account name, key, and endpoint. FileCatalyst Hotfolder can be installed to provide automation features, further maximizing efficiency.

FileCatalyst is available in the Azure Marketplace with a consumption-based model for ultimate flexibility. Users can scale throughput by increasing their instance size as required, and only need to pay for the amount of compute hours used.

• Accelerated transfer speeds for large files (>500MB) when the bandwidth exceeds 1.5 Gbps with > 80ms RTT, or 1.0 Gbps with > 150ms RTT.
• Less CPU intensive on client machines, making it easier to scale to higher speeds.
• FileCatalyst uses a single UDP stream per file instead of multiple TCP streams, making it friendlier to other traffic.
• Application-level features include automation and web uploader.
• Can be scaled beyond 2 Gbps, when the infrastructure allows. FileCatalyst isn’t limited by RTT and doesn’t require additional streams to scale.
• Very tolerant of packet loss (wifi and mobile networks) and jitter (bonded and multipath links).