In our ongoing discussions with storage administrators and market analysts, we see a growing tide of urgency around how to deal with aging NetApp environments. Enterprises are looking for ways to offload NetApp filers in enterprise…

My last blog post – Top 7 Options for Storage Savings in 2012… – focused on some of the top technologies that can help you save precious storage dollars as we enter the new year. Subsequent

As we enter 2012, data center and enterprise managers are faced with an array of storage choices. Some of these options have been highly publicized like flash storage, and some, such as WAN optimization, have become…

When thinking about symbiosis, my first thought takes me to my seventh grade science class; however, symbiosis can be applied to many fields, even network storage. Advancements in tiered storage allow storage administrators to match data…

It seems like everyone on the planet attended VMworld® several weeks ago. I read, although I can’t recall the source, that the VMware® ecosystem constitutes a $45 billion per year industry. No one can dispute the…

In a previous posting I addressed NAS “hot spots”… and closed by stating that I would follow-up with a post related to tiered storage. The concept of tiered storage is relatively easy to understand. All data

As news of the Las Conchas wildfires approaching the Los Alamos National Laboratory hit the Internet, many people, me included, pause to think of possible consequences. While there is probably nothing to worry about in this…

Now that you know what to look for when evaluating cache appliances…, we can look at the ANX 1500 NFS Throughput Acceleration Appliance.
The ANX 1500 is designed to both improve throughput of NFS data

Before embarking down the path of evaluating caching appliances for your NFS (network file system) environment, there are some important things to consider.  There are several options available and the results that you might see from…

In the first two installments of our NFS tutorial—The Metadata Challenge and NFS READs, WRITEs and Why Caching Matters…—we focused on some of the basic functionality of the NFS protocol and why, in certain

The last installment of our NFS tutorial introduced the concept of metadata: those little bits of data about data that can bring even the mightiest of NFS installments to a slow crawl. With the metadata piece…

Organizations struggle daily with the challenge of growing amounts of data and applications, which are placing a heavy burden on their existing storage infrastructures. Storage admins constantly fight to keep users happy with quick and efficient…

The promoted benefits of automated tiered storage include providing an automatic means to place data, based on its importance, on the right media. The three most common examples of “right” media promoted by some of the…

When we set out to design the ANX 1500, our objective was to create a product that would sit alongside the NAS that customers already have and synergistically deliver better performance, better scalability, and easier to…

Installing the ANX 1500 on an NFS network is analogous to expanding a two-lane bridge to ten lanes, allowing for traffic to increase speed. As latency is reduced, cars are able to arrive at their destinations…

A Win-Win Solution
How do you cost-effectively solve poor response times from an overburdened NAS (network-attached storage) filer without having to purchase an additional high priced NAS controller and disk drives?

First, you integrate Alacritech’s Dynamic…

While it’s not uncommon for companies that reinvent themselves to change their names, it was a course that we weren’t prepared to take with Alacritech. The reason is simple. We didn’t reinvent the company. Instead we…