In 2005, I was a a Software team leader in Montilio, a company who tried (and managed) to accelerate File server access, by separating control plane from Data plane and making sure the data is not copied back and forth to CPU memory.
What I did not remember was that we were up against RDMA solutions, a technology I now promote. I still think Montilio had a real cool product, but it could not catch up to the fast pace of CPU and storage development.
And quote from the CEO:
Companies such as Alacritech and Neterion have attempted to alleviate this burden by using Remote Direct Memory Access and TCP Offload Engines, approaches Tsuk says are more designed to accelerate network traffic than make file processing more efficient.