"Until now, companies have been cobbling together solutions that require more and more drives, yet result in unpredictable and poor performance, greater complexity, increased latency and reduced control," said Larry Boucher, CEO of Alacritech. "They also risk data loss, have to turn ownership of their data over to outsiders, and in the end, pay more for their trouble. What this will allows you to do is take disks from 25% utilization to 100% utilization, but at the same time keep the same performance."

According to Boucher, the ANX 1500 appliance accelerates responses to requests from clients using NFS v3, lowering application response time for users, by intelligently distinguishing between front-end sharable performance cache and back-end intelligent NAS. The process allows for the fastest retrieval of the most active or used data via cache, he added.

"Our testing to date confirms that metadata caching performance on the Alacritech ANX 1500 is quite powerful," said Steve Kowalski, executive director of systems engineering at Sony Imageworks, in a statement. "Based upon these results, the ANX 1500 has the potential to open up both new and interesting economies of scale."

Sony, which is primarily a NetApp NAS user, has yet to use its ANX 1500 in a live environment, but in a test environment in front of four NAS nodes from Isilon Systems.

Alacritech funded development of the ANX 1500 largely through $34 million in venture capital funding raised over the past several years. The San Jose-based company was founded in 1997 by Boucher, who also founded host-bus adapter vendor Adaptec and Auspex Systems, which invented the network file system that is the basis of many of today's NAS systems.