Windows File Serving: Now with More Scalability

Okay, okay. 

It's been a long while. 

I have no excuses. Well, at least good excuses.

I was on vacation last week. 

Then there was the ramp-up to the vacation the weeks before.

Before that there was this really good TV show on.

My dog ate my Internet?

No?

Moving on: It's T-minus one day before I embark to South East Asia and my grand tour of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.  I'll be heading over to speak at TechEd SEA 2007, and chillin' with some customers, partners and local SE Asia 'softies. 

In preparation for my long sojourn, I was going through my  Inbox (post-holiday mind you) and found that I didn't tell you about the recent (well from mid-August) joint white paper Alacritech and Microsoft did about how the Scalable Networking technologies, specifically TCP Chimney, working in concert with Alacritech's TOE NICs help improve Windows Server file server performance and scalability.

Here's a link to the white paper:

Enabling Greater Scalability and Improved File Server Performance with the Scalable Networking Pack and Alacritech Dynamic TCP Offload

Overall our joint testing showed double digit improvements in throughput and scalability over traditional NICs:

Testing showed in every case that the combination of Microsoft’s TCP Chimney Offload and the Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators provided improvement over standard legacy NICs…as the performance demands on the server increased, the benefit of Microsoft TCP Chimney Offload and Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators over the legacy NIC became more apparent. In every case the Alacritech Accelerators provided superior throughput over legacy NICs, while at the same time they were able to support more clients and maintain service levels longer. On average the offload solution was able to support 19% more clients and 18% more throughput while maintaining linear scalability. At their highest point, the Alacritech/TCP Chimney Offload solution provided an average of 22% greater throughput then the legacy NIC

Give the paper a read through and let us know what you think. 

Meanwhile, stay tune for some updates from SE Asia over the next few weeks.

-- hama