etherFAX Achieves 3.4x Performance Improvement in Document Processing With Formulus Black Forsa

Venture-backed start-up Formulus Black Corp. announced benchmark results for its Forsa software with etherFAX, a secure data transmission solution for fast, reliable, cost-effective fax communications with hybrid cloud technology.

Tests by etherFAX system engineers showed Forsa slashed document processing times by over 70%.

etherFAX transmits millions of pages a day on behalf of enterprises in industries that rely heavily on fax communications, such as healthcare and financial services. Its secure, legally compliant cloud platform is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that permits systems, applications and devices to communicate, without the need for fax or telephony components on the customer premise.

A key step in etherFAX’s solution is document rendering, where files are adjusted for compatibility and consistency. This compute-intensive operation is performed on millions of pages daily. Its fax workloads are highly peak-centric, so etherFAX must scale to accommodate large volume bursts, while at other times resources may be idle or underutilized.

Forsa software utilizes fast DRAM memory as storage to increase memory capacity and improve processing speed while providing the necessary data management tools and features. With it, large database and analytics workloads can persist and run in memory on commodity hardware without any application modifications.

etherFAX tested Forsa on commodity server hardware on a data set of several hundred thousand files. Average rendering times improved by over 70% (715ms per document dropped to 211ms, and per-page time dropped from 302ms to 89.4ms).

“What’s most significant about these results is not just the time savings, it’s the potential to rethink our architecture with Forsa and improve the ability to accommodate bursts in fax volumes all at the same time,” said Paul Banco, founder and CEO, etherFAX. “We can truly take advantage of the added power and speed and we have the opportunity to support much larger workloads with far fewer compute resources using Forsa.“

“Forsa is designed precisely for companies like etherFAX where milliseconds and microseconds matter and have the potential to improve the OpEx and CapEx of the business. The best part of all is that etherFAX did not have to change or modify its document processing application to run in-memory on Forsa.” said Jing Xie, COO, Formulus Black. “etherFAX has built a resilient, state-of-the-art platform for the sophisticated needs of its customers, and Forsa augments their capabilities greatly.“

etherFAX engineers intend to perform more tests using Forsa in other stages of their solution including database and reporting functions.