The ARX2500 is designed for higher end file-sharing environments, and comes with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The ARX2500 file virtualization appliance.

Appliances in the ARX line now range from the ARX VE, which has a single Gigabit Ethernet port and supports up to 500 users, to the ARX4000, a 4U box with 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports and two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports that can accommodate up to 12,000 users.

Michael Raposa, senior director of infrastructure at video content provider In Demand LLC, said offering 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports on an appliance makes management significantly easier than it is when it's necessary to share traffic over multiple gigabit ports.

In Demand provides the pay-per-view and video-on-demand content that consumers purchase via cable television providers such as Cox, Comcast and Time Warner. The company installed two ARX4000 appliances in front of about 300TB of capacity on NetApp network-attached (NAS) arrays. The virtualization appliances have allowed In Demand to create a single domain name space across all 300TB of capacity, so that applications no longer need dedicated logical unit numbers (LUN), but can expand capacity and performance on demand.