Alacritech is a Silicon Valley manufacturer of storage network acceleration solutions that improve the performance of the existing enterprise network storage infrastructure without having to replace the investments made in the NFS-based storage network. Network acceleration appliances eliminate corporate storage/NAS sprawl by extending the life of the enterprise’s existing storage framework and reducing the dependency on growing pools of over-provisioned and underutilized disk drives. Alacritech’s main products are the ANX 1500 series of network throughput acceleration appliances.

Throughput Acceleration Appliance

The ANX 1500 throughput acceleration appliance supports TCP/IP, NFS, DHCP and 10GbE standards and features 48GB of DRAM and up to 4TB of solid state drives. The ANX 1500 caches active data stemming from client requests, such as frequent access of the same payload data or NFS metadata, and optimizes performance through the use of TCP and NFS Offload technology embedded in Alacritech’s custom silicon. The ANX 1500 has a two-tiered caching system that provides record performance by accelerating READ and NFS metadata-intensive OPS, greatly reducing the burden on existing NAS devices, and enabling better WRITE performance and scalability. With a performance layer based on frequency of use, NFS OPS are maximized, resulting in reduced traffic on backend NAS servers, and a dramatic reduction in total IOPS required and storage drives needed from back-end storage.

The ANX 1500 accelerates NFS throughput and enhances the performance of existing NAS boxes. A single ANX 1500, with 4TB of SSDs, can deliver 120,000 NFS SPECsfs2008 operations per second (OPS) and an ORT of .92ms and only requires 1/5 of the NAS infrastructure otherwise required to deliver the comparable NFS OPS performance. The appliance allows enterprises to achieve significantly higher disk utilization, using 80 percent of available disk space, versus the current standard of 20 percent in performance environments.

History

Alacritech was founded in 1997 by technology pioneer Larry Boucher, the author of the SCSI standard and founder of both Auspex and Adaptec. Larry and his team of fellow entrepreneurs foresaw the convergence of storage and networking and the large amount of processing power and bandwidth consumed when moving data across the network. To solve this problem, the team designed Dynamic TCP Offload and cast it into silicon. The high speed network interface cards

Network card

A network interface controller is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network....

 (NICs) enhanced performance by moving some TCP/IP processing from the CPU

Central processing unit

The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...

 to the NIC. In 2004, Alacritech sued Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and Broadcom

Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los...

 for patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 infringement. The suits were settled in 2005 with both companies agreeing to license

License

The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...

the Alacritech patents.