VirtuLocity Networks

“Accelerating the Internet Wherever and Whenever You Need It...”—that’s the tagline of VirtuLocity Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud software start-up. VirtuLocity provides “virtual velocity” by accelerating enterprise and network operators’ broadband connections without buying expensive hardware, extra bandwidth, spectrum, or end-to-end proprietary appliances. “We provide easy-to-use, scalable, public and private cloud software that accelerates your existing Internet connections by typically 80 percent over wired, wireless, or hybrid (mixed media) connections,” states Greg Gum, CEO, VirtuLocity Networks.

How Does it work? VirtuLocity uses patented algorithms and a patent-pending process employing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, to efficiently analyze internet connection characteristics and dynamically adjust transmission parameters to improve performance. For instance, their software rapidly calibrates and adjusts how the TCP/IP stack can communicate and send packets efficiently, even when encountering network impairments for optimum goodput from existing internet connections.

Why does it work? Internet WAN performance is affected by numerous factors causing congestion or delays impacting your connections’ overall throughput and efficiency. For example, congestion triggered by factors such as packet losses, excessive hop count, distance, delay, and jitter. Traditional TCP/IP adjusts for these factors by backing off the transmission speed until it acknowledges the congestion has subsided and starts to ramp-up again. This creates a sawtooth-like traffic flow pattern as the connection reacts to various impairments causing congestion (Figure 1 below). Using VirtuLocity’s new software-defined virtual acceleration, compact machine learning algorithms learn and continuously vary the transmission parameters to achieve maximum efficiency as the network connection changes, resulting in smoother transmission and higher overall goodput.

Commercial Products: VirtuLocity offers two products: VLNCloud and VLN software. VLNCloud is an Internet acceleration service available on Amazon AWS Marketplace as a pay-as-you-go Amazon Machine Image or system container running on Linux based operating systems.

Customers log into their account, click on the VLNCloud icon, and apply the function as virtual acceleration instances orchestrated to run in-line with their targeted workloads. The second product, VLN, is a licensable, on-premise based software solution running on bare metal, white box servers, networking devices, virtual machines, or VNF’s within data centers or enterprise IT environments.

Customer use cases: Initial applications have been content distribution of videos, pictures, or live streaming real-time events. The company has signed a worldwide Content Delivery Network, a European mobile operator, and a live streaming service provider using VLN software to accelerate content from edge caching and origin servers, directly to consumers. Using accelerated connections not only improves subscribers’ access to cached content but also speeds-up live streams that cannot be cached, such as live events and on-site reporting. As an example, the European mobile carrier had been experiencing packet loss and jitter which impacted users trying to stream videos, games, or anything media-rich. VLN software increased bandwidth throughput by 80 percent while delivering 28 percent goodput improvement across their mobile distribution points, ensuring significantly better user experience without adding infrastructure or deploying new spectrum.

What’s Next? VirtuLocity wants to bring these operator-based acceleration benefits and capabilities directly to enterprises and teleworkers. VLNExpress is a new SaaS-based, express cloud storage solution powered with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for agile, automated configuration and voice-based management. VLNExpress enables voice activated accelerated storage, backup, and management tasks by taking advantage of recent advancements from the Amazon Alexa personal assistant technology. “VirtuLocity’s VLNExpress software defined orchestration provides automated, accelerated backups and retrieval from corporate sites or popular cloud services by using an intuitive, well-known voice assistant for triggering rapid access, file sharing, and backups wherever, and whenever they need it,” says Gum.