Gear6, accelerating I/O for real time application performance, today announced that its CACHEfx scalable caching appliance and Reflex 1.5 operating software has been named a winner of the eighth annual eWeek Excellence Awards.

“Based on the rigorous judging criteria, the eWeek Excellence award validates that Gear6 has been leading the charge for the last two years with network-based, scalable caching solutions as an innovative means of adding critically important memory to the data center,” according to Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing at Gear6. “Unlike competitive offerings that add direct-attached memory to a subsystem, Gear6 operates from within the network to provide customers much greater scalability and flexibility to apply a caching resource across multiple storage systems and file systems.”

eWeek editors judged the entries on: “Innovation; practical integration of emerging technologies; suitability to task; cost effectiveness; potential for helping companies create business efficiencies; manageability; potential for helping companies develop competitive advantage; and securability.”

“The products that were entered in this year's program show how much things have changed: Many of the products enable and/or support server virtualization, and many are delivered via the Web and in the open-source model,” according to eWeek. “The finalists and winners in the eighth annual eWeek Excellence Awards program are leading in these new directions, as well as meeting the new management and security challenges cropping up along the way.”

Gear6 CACHEfx appliances enhance both traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) deployments and clustered file systems while scaling seamlessly to support increasing amounts of bandwidth and up to terabytes of cache capacity. Serving requests from high-speed memory provides applications a massive throughput increase and real time access to data. Large files, data sets and entire databases are reliably cached to accelerate I/O performance 10–50 times faster than traditional mechanical disk based solutions.

According to eWeek, “The job of selecting and buying technology has never been easy, but it’s only getting harder as the development pace quickens, the deployment and platform options grow, and the stakes get higher. The goal of the eWeek Excellence Awards program, now in its eighth year, is to make that job a little bit easier by pointing IT buyers to the most promising new enterprise products and technologies.”