PITTSBURGH, August 1, 2012 – Avere Systems today announced that its CTO and co-founder Mike Kazar was named the recipient of the 2013 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award for his outstanding contributions to information storage systems.

For more than a century, the IEEE, the world’s largest technology professional membership association, has sponsored various programs to honor achievements in education, industry, research and service. The organization’s awards and recognitions each have a unique mission and criteria, and offer the opportunity to praise distinguished colleagues, dedicated teachers and corporate leaders who have made a lasting impact on humanity, technology and the profession. Established in 1992, the IEEE Johnson Award is given on the basis of achievements in computer storage as judged by the impact and historical significance on the evolution of computer storage systems.

The IEEE Johnson Award further validates Kazar’s expertise in network file system architectures. Over the course of his career, Kazar has been responsible for driving the technology vision and architecture of multiple entrepreneurial endeavors. His role at Avere is leading the development of the company’s innovative NAS optimization architecture that helps organizations build high-performance NAS infrastructures at a fraction of the cost and footprint of standard storage architectures, delivering superior business agility.

Prior to Avere, Kazar was vice president and Chief Architect at NetApp working on Data ONTAP GX, the technology he developed while co-founder and CTO at Spinnaker Networks. Before Spinnaker, he was a Distinguished Engineer at FORE Systems working on LAN Emulation for ATM and several Ethernet to ATM bridge products. Prior to FORE, he co-founded and served as Chief File System Architect at Transarc Corporation (now part of IBM). Earlier in his career, Kazar worked on versions of Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew File System as well as the Andrew Toolkit, an OLE-like windowing toolkit.

“I am honored to have received the IEEE Johnson Award for contributions to the data storage industry,” said Kazar.  “I’ve been fortunate to have worked and collaborated over many years with outstanding people, including those at Avere, NetApp, Transarc and especially Carnegie Mellon, where many of these ideas originated.  These collaborations have contributed to delivering fundamental advances in network file system architecture.”

Kazar earned an S.B. in Mathematics and an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science.

About Avere Systems
Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new storage media using real-time tiering. Avere’s FXT Series Edge filers allow organizations to achieve unlimited application performance scaling, free applications from the confines of the data center by eliminating latency and cut storage costs by more than half. Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.