Ron Bianchini is The Sultan of Storage at Avere Systems

The first two breakthroughs in storage technology led to multimillion-dollar acquisitions—FORE Systems bought Bianchini’s first company, Scalable Networks, in 1996 for $34 million; and NetApp bought his second company, Spinnaker Networks, in 2004 for $300 million. Now, Bianchini and other leading minds in distributed file systems, such as Michael Kazar and Dan Nydick, are optimizing enterprise data storage with Avere Systems.

Founded in January 2008 by Bianchini, Kazar and Nydick, Avere has spent the last five years revolutionizing the way enterprise applications interact within diverse storage environments. Built upon the premise that storage systems shouldn’t hinder application performance and vice versa, Avere has created a unique platform that allows unlimited performance scaling and storage capacity scaling at a fraction of the price of other enterprise storage solutions.

Traditional storage architectures are bound by the performance limitations of hard disk storage and the capacity limitations of flash storage, because an enterprise typically builds its storage network using one media type or the other. With Avere’s product—the FXT Series Edge filer—choosing is no longer necessary, because it enables the use of both types of storage within the same network. Avere’s proprietary tiering technology smartly manages the storage network by automatically selecting the optimal storage media for each file, based upon performance and capacity requirements.

“With Avere’s platform, you don’t have to choose between storage density and performance,” Bianchini explained. “Avere’s FXT Series Edge filer gives your network infrastructure instant access to the best of both worlds—flash or disk storage—at 98 percent efficiency. We make sure the right media is in the right place at the right time. By using flash when it’s most appropriate and disk when it’s most appropriate, the enterprise data footprint is optimized.”

Avere’s most recent release of its operating system—AOS 4.0 or Avere Cloud NAS—takes the FXT Series Edge filer to the Cloud, enabling the freedom to store and access data anywhere without sacrificing performance.

“With Avere Cloud NAS, CIOs don’t have to be data storage experts any longer,” Bianchini said. “We allow them to focus their expertise on user-focused applications that are core to their business, not on data center management. Now with AOS 4.0, location truly doesn’t matter. Our technology will smartly manage data storage to optimize performance, while providing the enterprise cost savings that are inherent to the Cloud.”

A key component of Avere Cloud NAS is the introduction of Avere FlashCloud™ software, which integrates legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) with Amazon S3 and Glacier services into a single global namespace (GNS) that presents a unified view of all files via familiar NAS protocols. FlashCloud running on Avere’s performance-leading FXT Edge filers ensures:

• Scalable performance guarantees there is always sufficient CPU and network I/O for demanding applications.

• Scalable capacity enables a large working set of active data, up to 450TB, to be stored on the enterprise premises to ensure a high “hit rate” and low latency access to data.

• Clustering for high availability ensures that data are always available, even in the presence of network outages and other failures.

By bridging the gap that traditionally existed between the Cloud and high performance, Avere has enabled the Cloud to become a legitimate storage option for businesses with intense data needs, such as enterprises in Media & Entertainment, Oil & Gas Exploration, Life Sciences, Financial Services, Software Development and Data Hosting. While their focus is diverse, businesses in all of these industries have one need in common: massive amounts of data on demand at high performance speed.

“We are currently working with customers who have massive amounts of data who had never thought it was possible to leverage the Cloud for more than a fraction of their storage,” Bianchini explained. “Avere Cloud NAS eliminates the most serious technological challenges these customers face with moving to the Cloud. Moreover, the combination of Avere with Amazon Web Services offerings gives them an enormous cost advantage over traditional storage models and allows them to bend the data center cost curve.”

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