What is Tillered?

Tillered is a cutting-edge solution designed to optimise TCP bandwidth through sophisticated routing, congestion control, and TCP session manipulation. Unlike traditional network optimisers that require expensive hardware and consultancy with the aim of increasing bandwidth, Tillered maximises the efficiency of your existing bandwidth, resulting in significantly improved data transfer rates.

Key Features

• Congestion Control: The standard Tillered configuration works well for almost all network conditions, but the system can be adjusted for specific conditions. We continuously tweak and test network performance across various environments, from low-latency, reliable fiber networks to highly lossy and poorly performing satellite connections.
• TCP Session Manipulation: By fine-tuning TCP sessions using the Linux network stack and adhering to TCP protocols, Tillered forces the TCP ramp-up to be as fast as possible, significantly enhancing initial transfer speeds.

How It Works

To utilise Tillered, you need two key components: an Entry node and an Exit node.

• Entry Node: This node should be connected to your network, ideally on a separate network from the users or hosts that will benefit from Tillered. For example, in an office setting, you would have a main network for general use and a DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) network for the Tillered Entry node.

• Exit Node: This node should be placed as close as possible to your primary data transfer destination. For example, if most of your data transfers are to the US, you would install an Exit node on AWS in the us-east-1 region.

Setup Process

1. Install the Entry Node: Connect the Entry node to your DMZ network.
2. Install the Exit Node: Deploy the Exit node at your target location, such as an AWS data center.
3. Configure on Tillered Portal: Add both nodes to your Tillered Network via the Tillered portal. The Entry node will then assign a new virtual IP, which will act as a gateway.

Routing and Security

• Traffic Routing: The new virtual IP assigned by the Entry node can be used by your company firewall to route selected traffic (via policy routing) or all traffic by setting it as the gateway for your main network.
• Multiple Exit Nodes: Each Exit node added to your Tillered Network will provide additional virtual IPs on the Entry node, allowing for precise policy routing of traffic to specific destinations.
• Enhanced Security: For an additional layer of security, you can create a VPN using IPSec on your firewall. Route all traffic from the Tillered Exit node through the IPSec tunnel, ensuring secure data transfers.

Important Considerations

• Bandwidth Optimisation: Tillered optimises all available bandwidth, but cannot exceed the limits of the network connection itself.
• Latency: While Tillered significantly improves data transfer speeds, it does not reduce latency. In some cases, latency might increase slightly due to the nature of our Tillered router in the backend. However, the overall performance gain from the increased transfer speed often outweighs this minor latency addition.
• Packet Inspection: Tillered does not perform packet inspection or look at the data in the traffic being routed. The only packet inspection done is reading the source and destination IP to know where to route to and how to route traffic back. Any additional packet inspection isn't done as it would take too many CPU cycles and would not lead to any bandwidth improvement.

NOTE

The Latency consideration only applies if your company has requirements for low latency, such as trading companies or betting companies where inconsistent latency could be detrimental your operations.

Benefits

• Faster Data Transfers: Experience significantly improved speeds for tasks such as server migrations and large data transfers.
• Optimised Bandwidth: Maximise the efficiency of your existing bandwidth without the need for costly infrastructure upgrades.
• Scalable Solution: Easily add more Exit nodes to expand your network and improve performance across different regions.

Tillered is your go-to solution for enhancing data transfer speeds, optimising network efficiency, and ensuring secure communications across your enterprise network.

For more information or assistance with setting up Tillered, please contact our support team.