A network-attached storage (NAS) startup that received high praise from our judges for innovation and performance, New York City-based Exanet Inc. aims its product at shops requiring high-performance and highly scalable file storage. In benchmark tests last fall, the company clocked a six-node cluster at more than 200,000 operations per second on a single file system NAS system. ExaStore's distributed file system and distributed coherent caching allow the system to scale linearly in terms of performance, capacity and bandwidth.

ExaStore software is hardware-independent, but the firm offers several preconfigured systems -- the EX200, EX400, EX600 and EX800. In addition to support for NFS and CIFS, it supports the Apple File Protocol and boasts integration with Veritas' NetBackup, EMC's Legato NetWorker, and digital media applications such as Adobe, Dalim, Helos, Prinergy, Quark and Xinet. But when one judge noted the premium pricing, he wasn't kidding. List price for a SATA-based 10TB, two-node configuration is $125,000.

SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine editors