I recently met with Storage Switzerland analyst George Crump to film a video to discuss some of the current Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage problems companies are experiencing, and how they can be solved using NFS…

During the Holiday break, when many businesses slow down a tad, I took the opportunity to visit one of our customers, a university, and tour its facilities. It’s always insightful to see how your product is…

Several months ago I learned that our sales team was working with a prospect out of New York that was looking to couple our ANX 1500 with cheap commodity Linux file servers.  There were a few…

Power consumption is an issue that concerns us all.  Not just for environmental reasons, but because there are very real power cost implications with almost every IT decision we make.  Often the budget owner for electricity…

Being one of millions of mobile workers in today’s digital age, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of different devices for different tasks. I use my laptop to create, my smart phone to call, text, respond…

Tomorrow I’ll be headed to the 7th Annual Flash Memory Summit… in Santa Clara to give a presentation titled “Boost Performance and Extend NAS Life.”  I’m looking forward to speaking with other industry experts as part

I’ve had the chance to digest NetApp’s Flash Pool announcement….  Because Alacritech incorporates caching into its NFS Acceleration appliance, I thought that this announcement deserved a response. I’d like to briefly compare and contrast Flash

The price-performance associated with Flash Memory relative to other media is generally well understood.   For example, Flash, everything else being equal, is capable of generating far superior IOPS performance when compared to conventional hard drives.  And…

TechAmerica Foundation Presents “Best Of” Awards Recognizing Technology products and Services Across the Technology Industry
San Jose, CA – May 21, 2012  – Alacritech, the pioneer in NFS storage acceleration, has been named a finalist in…

Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc…., the respected Canadian computer graphics (CG) animation company, came to us in November with a big problem: their 200 creative animators were experiencing performance lags like never before and they couldn’t deliver

Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer consulting, has just finished a paper that describes various design approaches that make use of Flash technology to reduce latency.  This paper will be made available on the Alacritech website…

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…

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