NEWS & UPDATES 》 Introducing TOFFEE-Butterscotch - Save and Optimize your Internet/WAN bandwidth

Today I completed doing all the changes which are meant for the new upcoming TOFFEE-Mocha release. I have increased the resolution and the range of all factor variables. Instead 1 to 10 range now they have a range of 1 to 30. Unlike before the value 1 means it is lot more intense (or in some cases less intense) and the uppermost value 30 means lot less intense (or in some cases lot intense).

The TOFFEE Project website is hosted on Inmotion Hosting. And so I am looking for alternate hosting provider to build my first CDN node. My plan is to make multiple sub-domains of my website such as cdn1.the-toffee-project.org, cdn2.the-toffee-project.org and point each of this corresponding subdomain(s) to various alternative web hosting servers geographically spread across the world. Sometimes choosing the same vendor for multiple CDN nodes may result multiple servers existing in the data-center. And this becomes an issue if there is some catastrophic network disaster.

Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is a new innovative way to provide optimal application performance by redefining branch office networking. Unlike traditional expensive private WAN connection technologies such as MPLS, etc., SD-WAN delivers increased network performance and cost reduction. SD-WAN solution decouple network software services from the underlying hardware via software abstraction.

Here is my second software development update of TOFFEE-Butterscotch. In the previous update (28-Oct-2016) I discussed about the Alerts, etc. Whereas in my first TOFFEE-Butterscotch news update I have introduced about TOFFEE-Butterscotch research, project specifications, use-cases, etc.

If you want to deploy TOFFEE along with a web-proxy cache (such as Squid Proxy) you can deploy the same as shown below. TOFFEE does not cache files. TOFFEE does packet level network optimization. So if you want caching your web content you can use transparent mode web-proxy cache intercepting your WAN links. A web-proxy may reduce amount of data being processed (optimized) within these TOFFEE devices and so reduce the CPU overheads and improve its performance.

Assume you have two sites (such as Site-A and Site-B) connected via slow/critical WAN link as shown below. You can optimize this link by saving the bandwidth as well possibly improve the speed. However, the WAN speed can be optimized only if the WAN link speeds are below that of the processing latency of your TOFFEE installed hardware. Assume your WAN link is 12Mbps, and assume the maximum WAN optimization speed/capacity of Raspberry Pi is 20Mbps, then your link will get speed optimization too. And in another case, assume your WAN link is 50Mbps, then using the Raspberry Pi as WAN Optimization device will actually increase the latency (i.e slows the WAN link). But in all the cases the bandwidth savings should be the same irrespective of the WAN link speed. In other words, if you want to cut down the WAN link costs via this WAN Optimization set up, you can always get it since it reduces the overall bandwidth in almost all the cases (including encrypted and pre-compressed data).

Here is my power-consumption measurements of various devices deployed within my home lab. I measured via my kill-a-watt sort of power-meter which is fairly reliable and accurate. I checked its accuracy with various standard load such as Philips LED laps and other constant power-consuming devices to make sure that the power-meter is precise.

TrueBench is an unique open-source benchmarking system in which the core system performance and efficiency parameters are measured at extreme high resolution in the order of several million/billion µ-seconds for a given specific task. TrueBench is a part of The TOFFEE Project research. With TrueBench Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 2B and Raspberry Pi 2 are benchmarked and you can do a comparative analysis with standard mainstream x86 devices.

You can build a basic TOFFEE WAN Optimization hardware completely in software layer (i.e its networking data-plane and control-plane). And if you are a product manufacturer you can make commercial WAN Optimization products with TOFFEE with software layer alone. And if you choose to improve its performance, you can use any third-party PCIe Compression Accelerator cards.

In the previous update (17-Jun-2016) I discussed about the upcoming new Random Packet drop feature along with other completed features. Now I completed the entire TOFFEE-Mocha Random packet drop feature. I completed all the kernel components and the UI support of the same. And to make GUI settings more organized I split the earlier Basic-Settings page into two separate pages namely: Packet Drop and Packet Delay. So this way it is simple to understand settings according to their functionality.