The support team here at FileCatalyst team polled our customers who are using FileCatalyst Central v3.6 and asked what type of improvements they would like to see in our next release of Central. Security was a topic of interest to our customers, and they were asking us about the things we are doing in terms of security. With this in mind, we have taken steps with SSL that has secured our software...

Did you know it takes over $100 million to drill a deep-water well? Holding true to the cliched phrase oil and gas companies know all too well: it takes money to make money. The deep digging associated with the oil and gas industry requires equally deep pockets. When it comes to making the big business decisions required in the oil and gas industry, major companies like Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP...

Any FileCatalyst application that previously used embedded Java applets in a browser has a migration path to FileCatalyst TransferAgent. Moving forward with this solution, we have been able to bring functionality of this product Google Chrome v42 and newer. Firefox v40 and newer. Internet Explorer v10 and newer. In Internet Explorer, users have found that the application “stalls” at...

If you’ve ever tried to send a large video file, you know what a time consuming process it can be. For the production pros using Aframe – the world’s most powerful video collaboration platform – they need to transfer thousands of videos every day. Imagine how long this would take using standard FTP. ...

Over the years, we have had the privilege of working with many customers and partners who have benefited from the FileCatalyst technology and this year, that privilege continues. Once again, NBC Sports and FileCatalyst join forces to deliver seamless coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. During the Games, NBC Olympics will utilize FileCatalyst technology to move data over a 5 Gbps link between...

After the death of Leanord Nimoy this year, I found myself cruising the internet reading about him, about Star Trek, about sci-fi in general. I came across an article about teleportation that really caught my interest. This article pointed out that researchers had worked out how many bits of information were stored in a human being. It was an astounding 2.6 Tredecillion bits (that’s a number with...

A couple of months ago, our President and Co-Founder John Tkaczewski had the honour of presenting an introduction to data gravity at the NAB virtual conference. While the concept of data gravity has been around for a few years, it isn’t talked about very often, especially in relation to our business – file transfer. Coined in 2010 by Dave McCrory, the basic concept of data gravity is that...

Think of the internet as garden hose. Now let’s say that this hose has a kink and the amount of water flowing through the hose is constricted. By bringing in acceleration technology, the kink is removed and now the flow can be as much as the hose can take. The diameter of the hose will be your bandwidth, the higher the diameter the more data we can push, but we can’t push anymore data than the...

A recent article by CIO UK points out how digital technology is rising exponentially in the oil and gas sector. From seismic imaging to e-learning, 80% of senior executives in the industry believe digital advancements have revolutionized how they work. The remaining 20% believe digital technology has had a tangible impact. No matter who you ask, it’s evident the adoption is positively affecting...

Looking for a corporate cloud-based large file attachment solution? With file sizes growing and email servers still having file size restrictions, companies are in desperate need of a solution. The options most companies have are: free or paid online service hosted by a third party, in-house file transfer mechanism, or self-hosted solution on the cloud. Going with the free or paid solution...

Sometimes the hardest part of clean code is getting everyone else on board. In my last post on clean coding I talked about why clean code was important, how it saves money in the long run and increases productivity. Now I want to talk a little bit about some of the do’s and don’ts of clean coding. Proper clean code without side effects takes...

A recent article at tvtechnology.com, discusses the ambiguity of the term “archive,” and uses the Library of Congress archives as an example of how digital media is changing the way films are preserved for future access and use.It was not within the scope of the article to discuss how files are shuttled between locations, but it seems clear that file transfer acceleration would be extremely useful...

Video game development requires vast amounts of communication and collaboration at every step of the process. As development occurs, teams must share and exchange files within the office, across the country or even around the world. During development, Electronic Arts’ “Battlefield 4” game files were as large as 50GB, making file transfer a...

In a recent press release NASA announced that now they have a 622 Mbps Laser link to the moon. The press release also mentions that NASA was also able to transfer data at 20Mbps from earth to the space craft via this link. I’m wondering what effective rate was NASA getting when transferring data on this link? The data should be transferring at the theoretical limit of 622Mbps. Data Throughput...

FileCatalyst routinely helps users make full use of your bandwidth for file transfer. Scenarios in which bandwidth is optimized include cases where certain file transfers have higher priority than others, or when files being exchanged with a particular customer are more important than files exchanged with others. FileCatalyst Direct offers up a number of controls in its FileCatalyst HotFolder and...

There are many ways in which REST developers can tackle error handling. Most REST services will send some kind of error condition structure which embeds an error message describing the error and some kind of code. This is a good start. However, for some REST services the HTTP status code is not well defined. In some cases, the REST services send an “OK” status code of 200 regardless of whether an...

Ever run into issues sending large media files via email? The answer is probably yes, especially if you work in a field which requires the transfer of large format video or audio files on a daily basis. While email is great for many types of workplace communications, file size limitations (usually around 10 to 25MB) make it next to impossible to...

I recently had an interesting support case that I thought deserved to be shared with everyone. Essentially the customer was unable to run FileCatalyst Server as a service on Windows 7 Premium with the Windows firewall up. After attempting several things we discovered that it was a permissions issue with Java and Windows 7 services. To fix this I edited the fcconf.conf file as an administrator and...

Transferring large files over the internet has never been a simple task. Anyone that has ever tried to transfer a file larger than 100MB can vouch for the slow transfer speeds, multiple disconnects, data corruption, complexity of the task and security issues surrounding FTP. The same problem exists for web developers trying to implement web-based file transfer functionality. Ideally, the end user...

When to Use HTTP Post vs HTTP PUT vs HTTP PatchThere seems to often be some confusion as to when to use the HTTP POST versus the HTTP PUT method for REST services. Most developers will try to associate CRUD operations directly to HTTP methods. I will argue that this is not correct, and one cannot simply associate the CRUD concepts to the HTTP methods. That is:Create => HTTP PUTRetrieve =>...