Alacritech was a

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

company which marketed "intelligent"

network interface controller A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

s (NICs) to offload TCP/IP processing from the CPU of computer systems to dedicated hardware on the NIC: a concept now known as a

TCP offload engine TCP offload engine (TOE) is a technology used in some network interface cards (NIC) to offload processing of the entire TCP/IP stack to the network controller. It is primarily used with high-speed network interfaces, such as gigabit Ethernet and 1 ...

(TOE). Later it manufactured storage network products. Alacritech's main products were the ANX 1500 series of network throughput acceleration appliances.

History

Alacritech was founded in 1997 by Larry Boucher, the author of the SCSI standard and founder of both

Auspex Systems Auspex Systems was a computer data storage company founded in 1987 by Larry Boucher, who was previously CEO of Adaptec. It was headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Auspex introduced the first network-attached storage (NAS) devices. After an ...

and

Adaptec Adaptec was a computer storage company and remains a brand for computer storage products. The company was an independent firm from 1981 to 2010, at which point it was acquired by PMC-Sierra, which itself was later acquired by Microsemi, which itse ...

. The company's network interface cards (NICs) were promoted for enhanced performance by moving some

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

processing from the CPU to the NIC. In 2004, Alacritech sued

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

for

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

infringement. The suits were settled in 2005 with both companies agreeing to license the Alacritech patents. In 2008 Alacritech decided that the TOE / NIC business was not sufficient to sustain a viably growing company, and changed its focus to leveraging this technology for accelerating of

network attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

(NAS), resulting in the development of the ANX series of appliances.

Appliances

The ANX 1500 throughput acceleration appliance supported 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.

Present operation

The company did not achieve sufficient sales of the ANX product line to sustain ongoing operations and development, and shut down manufacturing and development operations in November 2013. The company website currently notes that the ANX product line is no longer being manufactured, but provides links for support of existing installations. As of 2018 the company was in the business of licensing its technology.

References

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External links

Alacritech, Inc. website
Networking companies of Canada