The networked client-server market has been in such doldrums of late, this blog has focused primarily on imaging, mil-aero, and similar verticals. But that hardly means there is little new under the sun, no pun intended. The UK’s notorious online IT source, The Register, tells us of BlueArc’s latest concepts for accelerating both OS and file system, in its new Mercury line using Stratix III FPGAs for Network-Attached Storage (NAS) acceleration.

Pay close attention to the details, because this is not the usual case of an FPGA accelerating the Fibre Channel or Infiniband access channel. Instead, BlueArc is using hardware to streamline access to the file system, promoting its SiliconFS. It’s not that hardware acceleration of a file system is a new concept – Sun Microsystems Inc. (aka Oracle Corp.) has provided mid-life kickers to its Network File System in the past through the use of ASIC-based add-in boards. But as demands for faster, smaller, and more power-efficient data centers increase as the recession wanes, the battle between NAS, Storage Area Networks (SAN), and other topological alternatives for speeding storage access, will benefit by placing more and more operating-system and file-system protocols in hardware. Perfect place for an FPGA.