Cloud Compute, a new innovation from Avere Systems

Avere Systems (www.averesys.com), pioneer in file storage acceleration, met the IT Press Tour group a few days ago for a deep refresh of their product and market strategy. Ron Bianchini, Founder and CEO, reintroduced the company and we clearly understood the shift the company made some time ago towards the Cloud. Let me rewind a bit the story, historically, the company was founded in 2008 to provide NAS acceleration for already deployed NAS. With AOS 1.0 introduced in 2010, the main idea was to place between NAS clients and installed NAS servers a new device - the Avere filer - to boost IOs. Client side protocols are maintained if needed with NFS and SMB with just NFS between Avere and back-end NAS filers. Filled with Flash/SSD devices, the addition of Avere protects the investment and gives a new life to filers and file servers without the new to change the full stack. Avere named their edge filer FXT and finally introduce a second prefix for back-end NAS devices: Core NAS filers. In 2011 with AOS 2.0, Avere introduced the Global Namespace capability, and in 2013 with AOS 3.0, 2 key features were unveiled: FlashMove and FlashMirror to complete a pretty rich features set. But this is really in March 2014 that Avere jumped into the cloud with the support of AMZN S3, the real beginning of their object storage support as back-end devices, in fact the start of Avere's Cloud Storage story with a gateway approach. In that case, the Core filer is replaced by the object storage solution. Later in October 2014, the company added a key second dimension to the cloud with the Cloud Compute approach, this is available with AOS 4.5.

The Cloud Compute mode gives to Avere a key and unique differentiator, no other vendor, as far as I know, is able to deliver such configuration without any deep application integration. With Avere application integration is reduced to 0 as the client access date with standard file sharing protocols. This is also possible thanks to Avere Virtual FXT able to be deployed in the Cloud to build a very flexible and scalable solution with compute on-prem and/or in the cloud with storage on-prem and/or in the cloud as well. For on-demand and peak workloads, this is just what users expect for a long time. With AOS 4.5 and Clod Compute capability, Avere has a the possibility to disrupt the market.