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Avere moves from accelerating filers to building them

Diversifies across the standing-reproach-to-NetApp sector

Avere is moving from accelerating filers to building them, introducing its own Edge Filer plus filer migration and replication software too. It's starting to compete directly with EMC and NetApp NAS boxes.

At a press briefing in Sunnyvale CEO Ron Bianchini said; "AOS 3.0 is what we really wanted to build." He says it builds on the convergence of three trends; flash, virtualisation and cloud. Effectively v3 AOS turns an FXT filer accelerator into a filer, but Bianchini is not taking on filer giants EMC and NetApp directly. He sees the FXT EDge Filer being a single Ethernet hop away from the servers with the data centre or core filers being the other side of an Ethernet switch or router.

What Avere is doing is a v3.0 update to its AOS software that operates its FXT filer accelerator products and turns them into so-called Edge Filers plus adding Flash Move and Flash Mirror capabilities to allow customers to easily move, synchronise and replicate data between storage devices, from data centre to data centre or remote office, and from data centre to cloud.

FlashMove "enables live data to be load-balanced across existing systems, transparent archival to secondary storage, new storage and new vendors to be added to the NAS environment, and old storage which is past its useful life to be decommissioned. … FlashMirror replicates data on primary and secondary Core filers and keeps them closely in sync by sending updates directly and in parallel to both filers. FlashMirror offloads the replication-processing load from the storage and supports clustering to scale replication performance to any level required."

Avere reckons FlashMirror is the only storage-side replication product that works with all filer vendors’ products.

It is interesting to note that NetApp has blessed Gridiron as an accelerator for block-based access to its unified storage FAS arrays but has not and probably now will not bless Avere FXT products for accelerating file-based access to its FAS arrays. Avere's existence can be seen as a constant reproach to NetApp for inadequate read/write access performance unless users buy hundreds and hundreds of disk drive spindles.

AOS 3.0 will be generally available within the next 30 days. The 3.0 software release is a free upgrade for existing customers. For new and existing customers FlashMove and FlashMirror require separate licenses. ®

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