BlueArc customers implementing a Microsoft Windows based infrastructure for network file services can now upgrade to BlueArc's new protocol acceleration module to dramatically increase CIFS throughput performance. Protocols like CIFS carry a significant protocol overhead related performance penalty that can slow down the potential throughput to demanding client and application servers.
The new Titan blade module was designed to optimize this processing requirement and enables customers to achieve the full potential of their CIFS performance. This feature provides both investment protection and support for emerging NFS releases in UNIX environments, and is especially beneficial to environments with lots of small files using CIFS, NFS or mixed infrastructure. Offered as a simple blade upgrade, customers can achieve CIFS performance at greater than twice the speed of what they have today.
The protocol acceleration module:Ideal for Windows consolidation, the protocol acceleration module can used to increase throughput performance and lower latency associated with application performance and response time. The module increases the number of application server connections and clients supported in Microsoft Windows environments. Customers with a need to increase server and client connectivity to common shared NAS resources can achieve this with the new module upgrade. Customers with 20 or more application servers and 100 or more client systems will benefit from this new upgrade.
Designed for performance, the module allows dramatic scalability in protocol workload profiles that tend to slow down due to heavy protocol related overhead activity. This is most relevant to CIFS environments that are I/O intensive and using lots of small file sizes or mixed file sizes. The new module will help provide future investment protection because both emerging versions of CIFS and NFS will be state-based and can already be supported. Lab tests using NetBench showed the new module achieved up to 250% improved performance, allowing the Titan to sustain a much larger number of simultaneous client connections with a much larger overall workload.
The new protocol acceleration module is available for both the Titan 2100 and the 2200. The module provides flexibility as infrastructure and workload requirements change, giving customers investment protection and delivering on the promise of providing blade upgrades to achieve higher levels of performance and functionality on the Titan NAS platform.
