NAS Systems:
As IT costs grow, budgets shrink, and demand soars, there is an immediate need to extend and/or consolidate existing server assets for NAS Systems. Many IT departments are currently faced with reduced capital budgets as well as decreased staffing levels.
Considerable financial, staffing, and time investments have already been made in a typical data center including original capital equipment costs, installation, configuration, and ongoing server maintenance and deployment costs. Preserving these investments of NAS Systems by extending the useful life of these systems can be critical to the success of many projects.
With Windows-based servers and NAS Systems handle increasing network traffic, one focus is to find a solution that moves network data as quickly and effectively as possible. Providing mission critical network availability with minimal server resource usage is the ideal.
Well balanced file servers frequently spend half their CPU resources performing network protocol processing. This resource bottleneck makes them prime candidates for upgrade of their network adapter with a TCP Offload Engine (TOE) Network Interface Card (TNIC).
The TNIC Solution
TNICs provide significant performance boosts and server efficiencies independent of other improvements to the system. Installation of a TNIC allows the greatest number of clients to be served using the existing server. The upgrade is as simple as any other PCI card installation - simply install the hardware and driver - and experience immediate performance improvements including:
- Reduced latency For NAS Systems
- Increased throughput
- Reduced CPU utilization
Quick, Easy, and Low Risk
Optimized file server platforms with TNICs now support more users with the same or even fewer management resources. The quick, easy and low risk installation of a TNIC-based solution avoids tedious, time consuming, and expensive server upgrades and data migrations.
Alacritech's TNIC NAS Solution:
The Alacritech Accelerator, the industry's first Windows TOE card, accelerates network data across Ethernet environments with unparalleled levels of performance and efficiency. Integrating an Alacritech Accelerator into a Windows-based server provides the fastest and most effective solution for improving existing network-attached storage (NAS), backup, video and other network applications.
Enhancing Windows NAS Systems:
Delivering Over Twice the Price / Performance using TNICs
Upgrading with an Alacritech Accelerator also prepares the file server to take maximum advantage of Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Recent testing1 commissioned by Alacritech shows a dual processor file server running Windows Server 2003 with an Alacritech SEN2002XT Accelerator and an Alacritech SES2002XT iSCSI Accelerator offers better performance than a quad processor file server running Windows Server 2003 and using standard NIC cards, at less than half the system cost delivering 121% better price-performance.
Alacritech Accelerators extend the scalability of one of the lowest cost storage solutions available - Windows-based file servers. As Alacritech Accelerators support industry network standards for failover and link aggregation, additional performance benefits can be achieved such as:
Customer Benefits Of Enhanced Performance Of NAS Systems
Companies running data-intensive applications have utilized Alacritech Accelerators to achieve dramatic increases of server throughput and client response time, for example:
Nebo Systems, a leading healthcare information service and solution provider found Alacritech Accelerators enabled the company to cost-effectively increase existing servers capacity, while maximizing NAS system performance and availability.
