SPEC Results of Alacritech ANX 1500 Network Acceleration Appliance

Alacritech released the results of the industry standard SPEC (The System Performance Evaluation Cooperative) benchmark for NFS, called SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3, which showed the ANX 1500 Network Acceleration appliance delivering 120,954 Ops/Sec and the lowest reported ORT (Overall Response Time) of any submission to date.

For enterprises, this performance translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential savings, as well as record reduced application and data delivery processing times which can translate into decreased development time and increased revenue potential.

When the ANX 1500 is used in conjunction with existing back-end NAS systems, higher throughput can be achieved with far less latency than otherwise available. This allows customers to postpone acquiring additional NAS systems and the amount of disk-drives required to deliver performance, helping putting a lid on NAS sprawl.

For example, the ANX 1500 working in conjunction with NetApp’s older FAS6070 achieved approximately the same throughput as the newer model FAS6080, which used twice as many disk-drives and contained twice the processing power in published SPEC results1.

In addition, the ANX and the FAS6070 achieved .92ms ORT compared to the FAS6080 which achieved 1.95ms, meaning that the ANX, assisting the older NetApp machine, achieved less than half the latency of the newer FAS6080.

This means that older equipment can be paired with the ANX 1500 to achieve the throughput results of brand new equipment, avoiding the capital and expense outlays associated with upgrades. And perhaps more importantly, the ORT of .92ms is of benefit for many applications (such as rendering), and contributes to projects being completed faster. The ANX 1500’s low latency means enterprises can use fewer disk drives and/or increase the utilization of existing drives and use less expensive Tier 2 storage media while still meeting targeted performance. Lastly, CPU usage for the ANX 1500 hovered around 10% busy while the benchmark was running. Hence, the ANX 1500 has additional processing capability or ‘headroom’ to accelerate additional or even more powerful NAS devices, such as a FAS6080.

"Products such as ANX 1500 couldn’t be hitting the market at a better time," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, The Taneja Group. "In this tight economy the customer is looking to squeeze as much from their existing investments as possible. To get additional performance from existing NAS boxes, at a lower latency, without having to buy additional disk drives, simply sounds too good to be true. But SPECsfs benchmarks don’t lie. And we have seen this product in action. It behooves a look-see."

About the ANX 1500
The ANX 1500 improves the performance of storage infrastructures while substantially mitigating Network Attached Storage (NAS) sprawl in today’s enterprise.

The ANX 1500 delivers:

• The lowest cost per OPS in the industry, taking into account the current NAS investment in place, by significantly reducing costs in the area of capital, power, cooling and rack space;
• Increased throughput, higher NFS OPS resulting in improved application performance; and
• Increased speed of data access and lower response times

Note:
SPECsfs testing made use of 160 data disk drives in FAS6070; SPECsfs results for NetApp indicated that 324 disk drives were used in FAS6080 submission. Alacritech’s SPECsfs submission indicated total of 188 drives: Includes 20 SSDs and 2 system disk drives incorporated in ANX1500 and 6 system disk-drives in FAS6070.