Distributed Processing

AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit technology now delivers distributed processing capabilities. Each FTK license is able to leverage up to 4 processing workers (one on the FTK examiner machine and 3 distributed) to tackle massive data sets in a fraction of the time it would take using a single machine.

Each FTK user can have his or her own set of distributed workers. (Worker nodes cannot be shared). However, AccessData Lab and FTK Pro customers are able to share a distributed processing farm and shared database infrastructure.

Testing has shown an impressive increase in processing speed when utilizing distributed processing. You may use your legacy hardware single core machines or you can use 16+ core machines. FTK will utilize the processing capabilities of any supported computer you wish you to use. This gives you the flexibility to use the hardware you have to improve processing performance.

Reducing the processing time of complex and large data sets by more than half is an invaluable capability for investigative organizations, federal agencies and corporations inundated with forensic analysis and eDiscovery case loads.

Testing Metrics

The following are testing metrics on various images, which were fully processed, using all 4 workers. Fully processed includes indexing, carving, metacarving and hashing. The computers in the worker cluster were all identical Windows 7 64-bit, 8GB RAM, AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 Processor 3.20 GHz (quad core).

Processing speed increase in hours by number of total workers being used.

Percentage of processing improvement gained by adding each additional worker.