And as for that AMD connection, "David Stiles, our vice president of engineering, is basically the father of the Opteron chip set," Wernke explains. "He was at a company called NexGen that was then bought by AMD."

Last month, Agami -- if you're reading this aloud, the emphasis is on the second a -- announced the AIS 6000, a new line of NAS appliances promising capacity of as much as 19TB in a 5U chassis and throughput of as fast as 1GBps, well above the rates of its competition.

"Our box comes [complete] with CIFS, NFS, NDMP, snapshots, disk quotas, and is very easy to use and implement," Wernke says. "File System Replication is the only optional component."

That's good to hear, but what gives Agami devices that incredible performance? As far as I know, other nonclustered NAS appliances max out at about 350MBps.

"All of our boxes come with a Quad [AMD] Opteron," Wernke says. "It's a standard motherboard, but we don't use HyperTransport only to communicate between CPUs and memory; we have expanded it out to disk controllers and to network controllers."