A NAS head or controller can run out of throughput handling NFS operations. Users of Alacritech's appliance were able to push 500,000 NFS operations per second and it only used 10% of the box's CPU cycles, Boles said. "Which suggests it has a whole lot further to go," he said.

"If this is any indication, maybe you could push this to a couple of million NFS operations," he continued. "That's going to do better than any caching technology we currently have, and they have all the caching technology currently out there."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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