Accelerator's purpose is to transfer large data files across a network—especially under diverse network connections—more rapidly than traditional file copy and transfer utilities. Accelerator is intended to be used in a private network scenario where the goal is to make the most efficient use of the available bandwidth to move data as quickly as possible. Although Accelerator has adjustable bandwidth settings and dynamic transfer rate throttling, its behavior can best be characterized as aggressive in that it attempts to achieve its target bandwidth. By default, the target rate is 45 Mb/s.

Accelerator has been optimized to perform across various network lines, especially those with high-latency and reasonable packet-loss conditions, such as a satellite data connection. Accelerator was originally conceived to transfer files across WANs.

Due to the nature of the Accelerator transfer algorithm, you are unlikely to see a benefit when transferring small files (those that are under 100 MB in size). However, Accelerator does allow you to request to transfer multiple files for a transfer session by specifying a -dest command line argument. Provided the combined size of all files to be transferred exceeds 100 MB, you still should realize some benefit.

Accelerator is a single component of a larger custom system that we designed and use in-house. We find value with only the Accelerator portion of the system, and that made us curious if others might find the same value. We decided to provide the command line tool because it is the minimal version of the tool that still allows users to accurately evaluate Accelerator, provide feedback about how potential customers might use Accelerator, and what additional features are required. A simple command line tool also allows us to quickly push out new versions of the software as we receive feedback and feature requests during the evaluation.

Your network and firewall need to allow UDP traffic to be passed between the Accelerator client and the Accelerator server on whichever port you configure the server to listen. The default server port is 8869.

The 'live' feature ('-l' client command line switch) is intended to allow you to begin transferring a file that has not yet finished being created, ideally with the purpose of minimizing the time required in creating a file and transferring it to a remote location. When the 'live' option is invoked from the client as part of a transfer request, the server continues to monitor the file for growth and transfers more of the file as it becomes available. This assumes the file is being created sequentially and, after it has finished being written to disk, will not be modified. You can only use the 'live' feature when transferring a single file; it cannot be used in tandem with the -dest option, which allows you to transfer multiple files.

The intent of the technology preview is to enable an evaluation of the core file transfer capabilities of Accelerator and solicit feature requests. Although authentication and encryption are assumed to be critical features in any enterprise setting, we would like to keep the offering minimal until we get additional feedback from potential users. Similarly, if these or any other features prevent you from even evaluating Accelerator, we would like to hear that as well.

The Xiant Accelerator support page contains all of the information you will need to communicate with us during the technology preview.