Technology

Wide Area Networks (WANs) based on the Internet Protocol (IP) suffer from latency, jitter and packet drops – characteristics that disqualify legacy protocols for reliable transmission at high data rates.

Using unreliable RTP/UDP leads to lost packets and data corruption while traditional TCP based file transfers (like FTP) fail to exploit high bandwidth links and deliver poor data rates. TIXEL's patented Reliable WAN Transfer Protocol (RWTP) overcomes these weaknesses and delivers peerless performance. Along with its rock solid software framework it is the base for scalable transfer products for link rates ranging from 100 Megabits/s up to rates beyond 10 Gigabits/s.

The chart shows typical data rate characteristics of a file transfer. TIXstream achieves much higher and smoother link utilization without peaks and bursts.

Standard data transfer tools fail miserably especially on long distance multi-Gigabit networks. Thus many companies still ship hard disks instead of using high speed networks. Hence highly qualified personnel are doomed to wait and expensive equipment is under-utilized. TIXEL's technology is the key enabler for most efficient inter-facility bulk data exchange.

Benefits

The patent-pending technology enables new dimensions for inter-facility collaboration through optimizing the use of expensive resources whereas traditional transport protocols based on TCP fail on exploiting high bandwidth connections.

RWTP thoroughly exploits current and upcoming WAN connections by enabling extreme high data rates for reliable and secure data transfers. While conventional techniques provide transfer speeds of several Megabytes/second or less TIXEL's solution gives you 625 Megabytes/second — on the same infrastructure.

Thus TIXstream technology is the ultimate base for world-wide distributed production workflows.

Features

The TIXstream Series products provide reliable high speed WAN data transfers. A platform independent, intuitive web-based GUI is available as well as an industry standard SOAP interface for SOA integration and a CLI for use in batch jobs.

All TIXstream Series solutions are available with a security option offering on-the-fly AES-256 encryption at full transfer speed. Storage systems are connected via Fibre Channel interfaces. Popular SAN file systems like StorNext® and CXFS™ are supported. TIXstream products also enable remote playback of uncompressed HD and 2K content via HDSDI e.g. for collaborative reviewing without compromise.

Performance

On a typical WAN link with a round trip time (RTT) of 100 ms and 0.1 % packet loss FTP may deliver 0.6 Megabits/s or less. TIXway boosts this to 978 Megabits/s on a 1 G link. TIXstream transfers 5 Gigabits/s at a 10 G link.

Thus waiting for 100 Gigabytes to be transferred may take two days — or less that 3 minutes.