ACADEMIA

Cache IQ announced that Silicon Labs, an innovator of high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs), has selected the RapidCache NAS caching appliance to provide consistently fast data access for its engineering applications.

Silicon Labs ICs serve a broad set of markets including consumer, communications, computing, industrial and automotive. The engineering team demands fast, ad hoc access to large CAD and source code files. After evaluating a number of options to improve performance, including a NetApp upgrade, Silicon Labs selected RapidCache.

"Cache IQ's RapidCache proved to offer our engineering community dramatically improved performance beyond what our current NFS system could provide," said Everett Plante, CIO at Silicon Labs. "RapidCache was economical, easy to install and provides complete visibility into our NFS storage utilization and performance, which is valuable for understanding usage patterns and future needs."

Silicon Labs conducted an extensive product evaluation in its production environment and observed a 30% drop in the average CPU utilization on the NetApp system because almost all metadata requests and 70% of reads were served from the RapidCache appliance. This resulted in dramatically improved application performance and has extended the life of the NetApp file server, providing additional ROI.

Cache IQ CEO Joel Trammell states, "We are delighted to have Silicon Labs, a leading technology innovator, as our customer. Silicon Labs has proved that there is a smarter, more cost-effective way to improve NAS performance than purchasing additional capacity."