In the early part of this century, network interface cards and TCP/IP offload engines for Window-based file systems. By relieving the network-attached storage systems' controllers of the TCP/IP burden, throughput was increased.

with the company in 2005. Under the settlement, Microsoft was barred from using Alacritech's TCP offload technology in its Vista OS. Microsoft later licensed the technology.

Most NAS acceleration technology sold today owes some part of its IP to Alacritech, according to Jeff Boles, a senior analyst with the Taneja Group. That has allowed Alacritech to not only maintain a revenue stream over the past decade, but also to invest in developing acceleration technology for NFS systems.

"Some of this protocol acceleration stuff looks particularly interesting when it's applied to NFS," Boles said. "There's actually some additional IP besides the typical TCP/IP offload that's commonly recognized as a technology in the industry. Some of this IP helps scale up or scale out the handling of NFS traffic across multi-core processors. So it is really interesting about what you can do with NFS not just on the device level but in the network and across shared systems."

One of biggest bottlenecks of NAS systems today is how the NFS protocol is handled, according to Boles.