Avere continues to make progress in helping customers to address the separate issues of storage performance and capacity through adding features and functions to its edge filers. In its latest announcement it has added a virtual offering running on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud. You’ll want to know more about this innovative company and how it aims to save its customers money.
We took a look at Avere in October 2011, to weigh up the advantages of using its edge filer and in November 2013 to consider its invention of Cloud NAS. I spoke again to CEO Ron Bianchini and VP Marketing Rebecca Thompson recently to see what advances it has made since then.
Avere’s mission statement is to:
‘Reinvent storage with a Hybrid Cloud solution that integrates public and private object storage with legacy NAS into a single, cost-effective pool and provides scalable performance for users everywhere.’
Its Intellectual Property is in software exclusively up until AOS 4.5 tied to its FXT edge filer appliances.
It has been adding features and functions to the operating system used in its appliances as follows:
- AOS 1.0 was one of the earliest approaches to separate storage performance (in its edge filer) from capacity (in the core filer); it allowed the use of third-party NAS arrays as core filers and cheaper SATA arrays for major cost savings; market success came in its use in making the 12 highest grossing movies in 2013, a significant take up from Oil and Gas and major technology companies; it also signed up the US Library of Congress for all digital media available to the public
- AOS 2.0 added a heterogeneous Global Name Space (GNS) to the edge filer, which meant customers could attach NAS arrays from different vendors (NetApp, EMC, Oracle, BlueArc, Nexenta for instance) as core filers in the same cluster and access all the data on the arrays from a single mount point and within a single file system namespace
- AOS 3.0 added extra filer management features including FlashMove to move exports between core filers without disruption and FlashMirror to mirror data to 2 locations for disaster recovery processes; connection via NFS protocols allowed EMC’s Atmos Cloud storage to be included
- AOS 4.0 added the ability to integrate Cloud storage services using S3 APIs as virtual core filers (Amazon AWS, Cleversafe and Amplidata)
- AOS 4.5 added virtual edge filers running on Amazon’s EC2 compute Cloud to its physical offerings, allowing Cloudbursting from on-premises NAS (e.g. NetApp, EMC) and object-based (e.g. Amplidata, Cleversafe) storage arrays as well as in-cloud storage services (e.g. AWS S3); it has also announced the inclusion of Cloud Snapshots running on the physical and virtual edge filers for cost effective disaster recovery solutions; Clusters will scale from 3 to 50 physical or virtual FXT nodes
All FXT appliances can use NFS or CIFS protocols for connecting to the clients and NFS and S3 APIs for connecting to core filers. Avere claims its approach allows the optimal balance of flash storage for performance and hard disks for capacity, delivering up to 50 times the performance of traditional NAS and cost savings of up to 80%.
Despite the intentions and Big Data marketing campaigns for the major vendors (see Figure) the storage systems market continues to decline slightly each year: one reason is the ongoing bifurcation of demand into performance and capacity areas – something not being addressed by traditional NAS and SAN approaches, but keenly exploited by Avere and a number of other smaller vendors.
Avere’s development approach is certainly Software Defined, but not its delivery model, which currently restricts its use to its own physical edge filers and virtual ones on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud. It’s been careful to allow multiple choice in the use of core filers, so its customer don’t have to rip and replace their existing arrays to take advantage, although they can also attach much cheaper SATA storage if they wish. Its software approach is not dissimilar from many of the leading suppliers, however it moves with more agility since it has no traditional array revenues to protect. As with all smaller storage vendors, end-users will need to think hard before committing their corporate data; however Avere has some very major customers from the technology sector which helps establish its growing credibility.