Introduction

IBM Aspera Faspex is a global person-to-person file delivery and collaboration platform for file-based collection, distribution, and collaboration among geographically dispersed teams. Faspex users can send and receive digital packages using a standard web browser, a desktop application, a mobile app or an add-in for Microsoft Outlook.

Leveraging IBM Aspera’s patented fasp transport technology, Faspex delivers reliable, ultra-fast transfers, enterprise-grade security, and precise control over transfer settings and user permissions. Deployable on premise and on public, private or hybrid cloud platforms, Faspex is designed for extreme scalability and can seamlessly support thousands of concurrent transfers within a globe-spanning network of IBM Aspera transfer servers and clients.

Faspex can be deployed in a high availability (HA) environment. This document presents the Faspex HA Active/Active solution that leverages the Aspera Cluster Manager (ACM) software.

Intended Audience of This Document

This document requires that:
  • You have background as a network engineer.
  • You are knowledgeable about HA environments.
  • You are familiar with the requirements of your use case.
  • You are familiar with the Shares and High Speed Transfer Server products.
  • You have expertise and experience configuring third-party systems, such as shared storage and load balancers.

How to Use This Document

This document is intended to be used as a basic guideline to inform and facilitate the customer's ability to craft a HA solution to match the requirements of the customer's particular use case. Each use case differs in requirements, including:
  • Approved technology and software vendors
  • Hardware sizing requirements
  • Security requirements
  • Type of shared storage
  • Estimated traffic load and required bandwidth
  • Budget to cover costs
Procedures for setting up third-party systems such as shared storage and load balancers are outside the scope of this document.
Note: Due to the complexity of any high-availability setup due to differing requirements for each customer, Aspera recommends customer engage with IBM professional services to do an HA install or upgrade of IBM Aspera products. This document primarily serves as a reference detailing basic considerations and requirements to operate IBM Shares in an HA configuration. You can engage professional services by contacting your sales representative.

Covered Use Case

The use case described in this guide is a dual, Shares instance cluster, where the traffic is balanced between two active nodes, providing a high-availability service with seamless automatic fail-over in the event that one node fails or becomes unavailable.

It is possible to have more than two nodes in an HA environment, but that configuration is outside the scope of this document.

It is also possible to separate the web application from the transfer server portion in order to run these services on different hosts. You can find instructions on separating these processes in the IBM Aspera Shares Admin Guide, but neither this document nor those instructions cover that procedure for HA environments.

Note: This HA solution supports Linux platforms only.