Globus is a familiar way to orchestrate and share research data across institutions. But it is grid-era: it manages transfers over GridFTP and still depends on your DTNs being well-tuned — so at AI and petabyte scale it leaves fast links badly underused. Zettar co-designs the whole data path to hit line rate, turnkey.
Globus schedules and manages the transfer, but the speed you actually get still comes down to your endpoints — the data-transfer nodes, storage, and tuning underneath. Its grid-era design was built for moderate research flows, not for feeding GPU clusters or moving petabytes on deadline, so a fast link routinely runs at a fraction of its capacity. Making it fast becomes your tuning project, on top of the service.
| Globus | Zettar zx | |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Grid-era orchestration over GridFTP | Co-designed: storage, host, network & software |
| Realized bandwidth | Bandwidth-limited at AI scale; depends on your DTNs | ~90%+ — line rate, pretuned |
| What you operate | A managed service plus DTNs you tune | One turnkey appliance, ready on day one |
| Petascale at line rate | Underuses fast links | 1 PB in 29 hours at 96% utilization |
| Data path & control | Orchestrated through a cloud control plane | On hardware you control, on-prem and in-country |
| Workloads | File transfer & sharing | File, object, and live streaming in one stack |
| Tuning | Yours to do and maintain | Co-designed and shipped pretuned |
Globus is good at moving and sharing research data between institutions. When the goal is line rate at AI and petabyte scale — with nothing to tune — that is what the co-designed appliance is for.
The Zettar zx Appliance co-engineers storage, host, network, and software with an NVMe burst buffer to run at line rate — roughly 10× typical movers, with no software ceiling — and ships pretuned on the hardware you choose. With SLAC and the U.S. DOE it moved 1 PB in 29 hours at 96% link utilization over a 5,000-mile path, and it is in production at Taiwan’s NCHC. Winner of the Supercomputing Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge.
Compare Zettar with: rsync · Globus · Aspera / Signiant
For high-speed movement at AI and petabyte scale, yes. Globus is good at orchestrating and sharing research data, but it is grid-era and its speed depends on your DTNs being well-tuned. The zx Appliance co-designs the whole path and ships pretuned to run at line rate.
Globus manages the transfer; the throughput still comes from your endpoints and tuning underneath, so at AI scale a fast link routinely runs at a fraction of capacity. zx is co-designed across storage, host, network, and software to reach about 90%+ line rate, proven at 1 PB in 29 hours.
Yes. It is platform-neutral and runs on the enterprise hardware you choose, on-premises and in-country, moving file, object, and streaming data. Many research and HPC sites run it alongside existing tools.
Bring a transfer your DTNs struggle with — we’ll show you what a co-designed appliance does, measured on your data.