Introducing the ANX 1500 By Tim Kellogg On January 10, 2011

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 TCP Offload technology with solid state drives, dual 10Gbit Ethernet interfaces, 8 Intel^® processor cores and 48GB of DRAM.
• Second, you fuse this hardware together using an efficient micro-Kernel operating system that squeezes the optimum performance out of each and every component.
• Next, you add a user-friendly web-based GUI interface so system administrators can easily monitor, configure and manage the appliance from across the network.
• Finally, you fine-tune this system using decades of proven software experience, and in doing so, create a lightning fast purpose-built NFS acceleration appliance that smashes through latency barriers and dramatically reduces system response times, thus, saving customers time and money.

The end result is the Alacritech ANX 1500 NFS Throughput Acceleration Appliance.

The ANX 1500 acts as a front-end to NAS filers and addresses NFS requests sent by clients. Utilizing 48GB of DRAM for hot data and up to 4TB of SSDs for warm data, the ANX 1500 fulfills client NFS requests while offloading NAS filers so they can focus on what they do best, storing data. In the meantime, users will experience improved response times; thus, allowing them to be more productive. All of this system improvement is gained at a much lower price using the ANX 1500 than if the customer had taken the traditional approach of purchasing an additional NAS controller with disk drives, which comes at a very high price not only for the hardware, but also for the additional ongoing power cost and rack space required

Purchasing the ANX 1500 to solve NAS throughput and latency problems is a win-win solution. The IT manager wins by getting higher NAS performance at a much lower price. The user wins by getting improved response times from the NAS system and the customer wins by getting more productive users.

Have I piqued your interest?