Start-up unveils data access appliance

A start-up headed by veterans from the computer server industry has come up with some high-powered appliances designed to speed up cloud-based applications. Put together by Schooner Information Technology, each appliance is built on top of the IBM System x3650 M2 that runs Intel's latest Nehalem processors. It packs some 500GB of flash memory for storage, 64GB of RAM, as well as eight Intel processing cores.

Schooner claims that the appliances can deliver eight times the performance of traditional servers, though details such as benchmarks are not available at this point. It is currently in beta trials, and the company expects to start shipping in the third quarter of 2009. With a price tag of $45,000 per unit though, they certainly don't come cheap.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World

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