What Can NFS Bridge™ Do For You? By Tim Kellogg On January 28, 2011

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 sooner with fewer bottleneck headaches and the bridge is able to carry many more cars, contributing to higher throughput and mitigating the need to build more bridges.

The key to the ANX 1500’s lightning-speed performance isn’t just its cool hardware, which includes our patented acceleration ASICs, but also its NFS Bridge software that ties the hardware components together and allows them to work like a finely-tuned machine. This software has four major components: a high-performance purpose built operating system, NFS and TCP offload technologies, cache management and the web-based CacheView^TM GUI.

Through the tight coupling of Alacritech’s hardware and NFS Bridge, the ANX 1500 delivers both high throughput and low latency. These are typically orthogonal design goals in traditional storage systems. So how is this possible? It’s all in the execution of our acceleration technology and the very efficient use of processors and memory in ways that NAS controllers are not currently designed to execute. NAS controllers can execute a number of very important applications, but the processor contention negatively impacts scaling. It’s surprising just how big of a bottleneck the NAS controller can become; long before being disk-drive constrained. By coupling NFS Bridge with ample SSD flash and DRAM in order to more efficiently move data based on access frequency, not only will customers experience significantly less traffic being directed towards the NAS (i.e. needing fewer drives), but the controllers will be far less taxed, resulting in a drastic decrease in controller-induced bottlenecks.

Alongside this delivery of outstanding performance in moving data, NFS Bridge supports CacheView, a user-friendly web-based GUI interface that allows system administrators to easily monitor, configure and manage the ANX 1500 from across the network. CacheView has built-in context-sensitive help, so even novice users can easily understand all of the system settings without having to refer to the manual.

The end result? A user-friendly NFS acceleration appliance that delivers the best price/performance solution for delivering BOTH client NFS payload data and metadata.

So, if your NFS network throughput feels like it’s trudging through the bottleneck of a  two-lane highway, check out the ANX 1500 running NFS Bridge at www.alacritech.com/products/.