Alacritech Launches New NAS Accelerator Appliance

With data stores continuing to get out of hand in terms of management control, the ability to move loads quickly and efficiently within system and time limitations is paramount for data centers.
A growing number of companies are coming out with products specifically for that purpose. A prominent one is San Jose, Calif.-based Alacritech, which has a lot of IP in application acceleration and is now using it to speed up file service in network storage.
To this end, Alacritech unveiled the ANX 1500 appliance on Jan. 12, which moves data faster in network storage systems without needing modifications to filers. It just plugs right in, discovers what it needs in the system and works, Vice President of Marketing Doug Rainbolt told eWEEK.
“Isn’t that what appliances are supposed to do?” Rainbolt asked, rhetorically.
The appliances, which also feature TCP/IP offload engines, can work natively with most NFS-based NAS filers, including those from EMC/Isilon, NetApp and BlueArc.
The 2U version of the ANX 1500 can take up to 20 solid-state drives; it comes in capacities of 2TB or 4TB. Both machines carry a whopping 48GB of DRAM.
Rainbolt said the ANX 1500 can perform up to 120,000 operations per second using 4TB of solid-state disk drive capacity and 48GB of DRAM.
Pricing starts at $70,000 for an appliance with 2TB of SSD capacity. A 4TB system starts at $110,000. They are available now.