AOS 3.0 transforms FXT appliance into Edge filer optimized for today’s storage challenges

PITTSBURGH – March 28, 2012 Avere Systems today unveiled a new NAS architecture that will ensure enterprise IT is best positioned to leverage the performance benefits of Flash, the consolidation benefits of virtualization and the collaborative and economic benefits of the cloud. The new architecture for NAS puts the fastest media and the intelligence to manage it closest to the user, boosting performance and removing storage bottlenecks created by legacy NAS architectures.

Avere’s Edge Filer
As part of today’s announcement, Avere introduces its first NAS filer, the Edge filer, which operates in concert with legacy or Core filers, to implement the new architecture for NAS. The Edge filer has all of the data handling capabilities of legacy, or Core filers, but differs in data management.  Edge filers manage the global user namespace across multiple filers and remote facilities.  The new data management capabilities available with AOS 3.0 allow customers to easily move, synchronize and replicate data between storage devices, from data center to data center or remote office, and from data center to cloud.

Avere’s Edge filer overcomes the traditional and costly approach of adding larger and more expensive controllers and over provisioning all types of high-speed storage media to boost performance, which adds cost and complexity to the data center and does nothing to solve the latency problem inherent across long geographical distances that has relegated cloud storage to backup and archival use only.  Additionally, it provides a model to ensure that the gains in efficiency realized by virtualization aren’t negated by losses in storage performance due to changes in I/O profiles. Avere has created a new NAS architecture that eliminates trade-offs between performance and cost and enables primary storage to be located where it makes the most economic sense for business.

“Since its inception, Avere has been challenging the concept of using a traditional, monolithic NAS filer as a single tier of storage,” said Terri McClure, ESG Senior Analyst.  “With the introduction of its first full-fledged filer, the Edge filer, Avere is well positioned to offer an alternative model to solve some of the biggest technological and business challenges of NAS deployments, including the latency associated with remote storage deployments.”

FlashMove™ and FlashMirror™
FlashMove: Avere FlashMove takes the pain out of data migrations.  With FlashMove, there is no need to halt applications or suspend access to data during migrations.  FXT Edge filers serve active data to application servers and users while behind the scenes FlashMove software moves data transparently between Core filers.  FlashMove dramatically simplifies the management of NAS environments; it 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: Avere FlashMirror dramatically simplifies the implementation of a disaster recovery practice on a NAS infrastructure.  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.  FlashMirror is simple to install in existing environments and is the only storage-side replication solution that works with all NAS vendors’ products.

“Within the last few years, we’ve seen the potential benefits of powerful new technologies – Flash, virtualization and cloud – be addressed in a piecemeal fashion by incumbent storage vendors that still rely on product architectures built for an older generation of technology and a twentieth-century data center silo. It's time for a fundamental change in NAS design - one that opens up the network across the globe, makes it much easier to manage, and delivers efficiency without sacrificing performance,” said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. “With the introduction of AOS 3.0 and the Avere Edge filer, we are poised to be a catalyst in enabling customers to reap the maximum benefits from the latest technologies.”

Pricing and Availability
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.