Linoma Adds Clustering, Disk Throttling to MFT Products

September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

Organizations that have no tolerance for downtime with their file transfer activities may want to take a look at the latest release of Linoma Software‘s GoAnywhere Director software, which gains support for clustering. The company also issued a new release of its GoAnywhere Services software that allows administrators to limit how much storage and network bandwidth users of the product can consume.

Support for “active-active” clustering in version 4.5 puts another feather in the cap of GoAnyhere Director, the most feature-rich member of Linoma’s MFT suite. With this capability, multiple installations of GoAnywhere Director can work together to execute and manage file transfers.

Clustering benefits GoAnywhere customers in two ways, according to Linoma. First, it protects them from an MFT outage in the event that one of the servers goes down. Secondly, it provides horizontal scalability by enabling customers to ramp up their MFT capabilities by simply adding more GoAnywhere Director installs to the cluster.

As MFT has become a critical application, customers have less tolerance for downtime, according to Linoma chief architect Bob Luebbe. “When those transfers are time sensitive, such as ACH transactions or payroll direct deposits, they can’t afford any downtime,” he says in a press announcement. “Adding clustering to GoAnywhere Director gives these customers and their trading partners peace of mind.”

GoAnywhere Director version 4.5 also brings several other new features, including the capability to define global variables, among other enhancements.

While clustering helps GoAnywhere Director customers maximize their MFT capabilities, the new storage and bandwidth throttling capabilities in GoAnywhere Services version 3.3 help to limit what hardware resources users can consume.

In particular, the addition of disk quotas will help prevent users from filling hard disks with file transfers. Filling disks is bad on any type of server, but it can be particularly problematic for the IBM i platform, with its single-level storage architecture that blends DASD and memory into one virtual storage space.

Meanwhile, bandwidth throttling lets administrators control how much of the network users can utilize to transfer files. Thresholds can be set for both uploads and downloads, and administrators can also set restrictions based on the days or time of day users can execute file transfers.

GoAnywhere Services 3.3 also gains a new at-rest encryption capability in its Secure Mail facility that should protect the contents of file transfers in support of regulatory compliance mandates.

“Users have always been able to send files securely via HTTPS, but now we protect those files in an encrypted format while they’re stored on the customer’s network,” Luebbe explains. “Once those files are accessed by the authorized recipient, they’re automatically decrypted and ready to be viewed.”

All told, Linoma made 50 total enhancements to the two products, which run on IBM i, Unix, Windows, Linux, and Linux for z/OS operating systems and operate using the FTP, FTPS, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols. GoAnywhere Director, which is designed primary for use by larger organizations with internal MFT needs, offers some additional capabilities not found in GoAnywhere Services, including support for PGP and AES encryption, file conversion capabilities, and the capability to do direct database connections.

GoAnywhere Services is designed primarily for organizations that need to do a lot of file transferring activities with external customers and business partners over the web. Linoma also sells a third product in the GoAnywhere brand. GoAnywhere Proxy is a reverse proxy solution designed to provide an additional layer of security. For more information, see the company’s website at www.linoma.com.