Exanet Inc announced it achieved a record-breaking 203,182 operations per second (OPS) result on the industry-standard SPEC SFS benchmark with the Exanet EX600FC clustered network-attached storage (NAS) solution. This is the fastest result ever published for a single file system. In addition, Exanet achieved 1.2GB per second in a sequential read benchmark with the EX600FC. Exanet's ExaStore Grid-storage solution has demonstrated that the performance and reliability previously only available in a storage-area network (SAN) system is now finally available in an affordable NAS solution from Exanet. "The Exanet performance numbers we witnessed are exceptional and are normally only seen with expensive and complicated SAN implementations," stated Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "With the kind of performance offered by Exanet, customers must consider Exanet for both traditional NAS applications and non-traditional applications such as databases. The old way of looking at storage networking no longer applies." "With the record-breaking performance results we have achieved on our ExaStore NAS solution, we are clearly demonstrating that exceptional high-end performance and high availability is available at an affordable price for the mid-range business market," said Giora Yaron, Exanet's chairman and CEO. The EX600FC is a six-node clustered NAS solution running the ExaStore 2.0 software. It features no single point of failure in a full high-availability failover environment. ExaStore solutions can easily linearly scale from two nodes to hundreds of nodes allowing any level of capacity and total performance desired in a system. ExaStore maintains an easy-to-use environment as the solution scales with a true distributed single file system that automatically balances capacity and load across the system. ExaStore solutions use industry-standard, commodity off-the-shelf hardware, thus reducing hardware acquisition costs and service costs and protecting customers' hardware investments. The ExaStore EX600FC solution used in the benchmarks was a 24.5TB configuration using Engenio Information Technologies' 2882 Fibre Channel storage arrays. "We're excited that the Exanet high-availability NAS solution leveraged our technology to demonstrate superior reliability and world-record breaking performance," said Steve Gardner, Engenio's director of product marketing. "The scalability, performance and expansion capabilities of Engenio's technology match perfectly with Exanet's to deliver what NAS customers demand." ExaStore storage solutions are available both with fibre channel and SATA disk RAID arrays, allowing customers to build an infinitely expandable storage system, based on Exanet's proprietary Grid storage architecture. ExaStore supports Apple, Windows, UNIX, and Linux client environments using their native file system APIs: Apple File Protocol (AFP), CIFS and NFS. "By reaching these performance levels under standard operating protocols, we have demonstrated that ExaStore can indeed serve as the centralized storage within a heterogeneous client environment by significantly reducing storage management costs and total cost of ownership," said Clive Surfleet, Exanet's chief strategy officer. "We chose the ExaStore solution, long before these record-breaking performance numbers, because of its inherent reliability, scalability and stability in an always-changing production environment," said Todd Knipe, IT director for Mercury Print Productions. "With ExaStore, even when we thought we needed planned downtime for upgrades, it was nonexistent. We have added and removed hardware, changed our management rules, and redirected our complex workflow with only a few simple keystrokes and without ever disrupting any of our production operations. Now that we have heard of the new performance results, we are even more excited about our decision to standardize our storage requirements on ExaStore, because it further solidifies our decision that we have chosen a true technology leader in this field, not only for our current, but most importantly, for our future storage needs."