What is "alacritech"

Alacritech was a Silicon Valley company which pioneered the use of "intelligent" network interface cards (NICs) to offload TCP/IP processing from the CPU of computer systems to dedicated hardware on the NIC: a concept now known as TOE (" TCP Offload Engine"). Later it expanded this concept to become a manufacturer of storage network acceleration solutions that sought to improve the performance of the existing enterprise network storage infrastructure without having to replace the investments made in the NFS-based storage network. Network acceleration appliances eliminate corporate storage/NAS sprawl by extending the life of the enterprise’s existing storage framework and reducing the dependency on growing pools of over-provisioned and underutilized disk drives. Alacritech’s main products were the ANX 1500 series of network throughput acceleration appliances.