Alacritech Accelerators Raise the Bar on Server Performance; Driving Increased Simplicity and 10 to 1 Consolidation of Virtual Environment

Business Wire, Dec 13, 2007

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Alacritech Inc., the leader of innovative data-delivery technology, announced today that Cubik Media, a leader in marketing technology services such as video-on-demand, media design, content management, and web-based services, selected Alacritech's Scalable Network Accelerators (SNAs) to increase server performance and enable server virtualization and server consolidation. The implementation of Alacritech's SNAs has resulted in significant savings in servers and server administration while preserving Cubik's high available server and storage infrastructure.

"Even with the upgrade to an iSCSI SAN, we just weren't getting the throughput we needed for our video on-demand services," said Greg Lindberg, CTO, Cubik Media. "We realized the most efficient way to boost performance was to focus on the utilization of our existing servers so we turned to Alacritech to take the burden off of the processor and allow the server to focus exclusively on application processing and data serving. As a result, our on-line transaction and other web-based service infrastructure became more reliable, creating a better, more pleasant customer experience, while protecting our revenue stream."

Due to aggressive customer service level agreements (SLAs) Cubik Media needed to deploy a powerful and available server and storage environment. The company shifted from Direct Attached SCSI and SATA storage to a centralized iSCSI SAN in an effort to boost performance while reducing and simplifying daily maintenance, but loads such as video streaming continued to be an issue, especially on virtualized servers. Cubik installed the Alacritech network accelerators and within minutes, performance and availability increased substantially. With the performance increase Cubik was able to consolidate its physical servers onto virtual servers, 10 to 1, without compromising performance. In total, Cubik Media was able to consolidate 40 rack-mounted servers to 4 virtual servers running dozens of applications.

"Without the Alacritech accelerators taking on the TCP processing load and increasing server performance, virtualization wouldn't have been possible," said Lindberg. "Now after an impressive consolidation from rack to virtual servers, each of our virtual servers is able to host more applications and as a company we will save money on future server expenditures, systems management, power and cooling."

Alacritech's SNAs accelerate both network and iSCSI data transport while achieving significant system scalability. Deploying Alacritech's SNAs, with Dynamic TCP Offload, results in fewer servers being required, meaning less capital, fewer licenses, fewer support requirements and less power consumed.

"Boosting server performance lends itself to so many end-user benefits and Alacritech is pleased to play such a vital role in moving large volumes of data across networks," said Doug Rainbolt, vice-president of Marketing, Alacritech. "Cubik Media customers are able to confidently and reliably engage in on-line services without missing a beat in performance."

About Alacritech

Alacritech is the leading provider of innovative data-delivery technology that increases the speed, power and performance of servers, enabling a truly scalable network. Organizations that use Alacritech's proven technology are better able to reduce the burden of network processing on their server, scale to support more clients and applications, achieve higher performance and realize increased network utilization. For more information visit the Alacritech web site at www.alacritech.com or contact the company at info@alacritech.com.