NAS Appliance From Start-Up Avere Scales Performance to Millions of Ops/s

Avere Systems, Inc., an emerging company focused on delivering Demand-Driven Storage solutions, unveiled its FXT Series of NAS appliances that dynamically move data between Solid State and HDD tiers, yielding higher performance and lower costs while avoiding over-provisioning of storage capacity, inefficient use of limited data center space and wasted power consumption.

The FXT Series is ideal for organizations looking to improve the current performance of their storage networks while significantly driving down the cost of their existing architectures.

With the introduction of the FXT Series, business demand for rapid data access is met by storing active client data on a cluster of high-performance FXT appliances. The FXT moves inactive data to a legacy NAS file server that is optimized for capacity and data retention. System performance scales linearly by adding additional appliances to the FXT cluster and capacity scales by adding disk storage to the NAS file server or mass storage system. Decoupling storage network performance from the disk capacity available enables Avere to deliver enterprise-class application performance while slashing CAPEX acquisition costs by 60% and ongoing OPEX expenditures by a 5:1 ratio on average.

"Before we added the Avere FXT Series to our storage network, we were seriously considering replacing some of our slower mass storage systems due to their inability to keep up with client demands," said Bryan Nielsen, IT Architect at the Salk Institute. "The introduction of the FXT into our network took the load off of these devices, breathing new life into our current storage infrastructure investments. In addition, Avere’s FXT opens up new possibilities in price, performance and size considerations for future storage investments."

The FXT appliances contain both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance without compromises on all types of workloads. Reads, writes and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere’s unique approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliance monitor access frequency patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server. Movement of data occurs in real-time – not in hours or days – and occurs at the file or even block within the file level. All of this is done automatically by the system – there are no complex policies to configure or update.

"Conceptually, an architecture like this could quite literally change everything we thought we knew about storage and I/O. If the Avere architecture can perform as intended, it might just turn decades of thinking on its head," said Steve Duplessie, Founder of ESG.

The Avere FXT Series launches
with two available configurations:

• The FXT 2300 features eight 146GB 15k SAS disks for an HDD capacity of 1.2TB, which can scale to 29.2TB per cluster.
• The FXT 2500 features eight 450GB drives for 3.6TB of capacity and up to 90TB of HDD per cluster.

Both appliances come in a 2U form factor and feature 64GB of DRAM and 1GB of NVRAM with a maximum of 1.6TB of DRAM per cluster. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of operations/sec performance and tens of gigabytes/sec throughput. Each appliance provides redundant network ports and power and has either two 10GbE and two 1GbE network ports or ten 1GbE ports. List pricing starts at $52,500.

"The FXT Series is a milestone in the evolution of storage products with its dynamic use of storage media to maximize speed while minimizing cost," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. "The end-result is a product line that can deliver tremendous business value to customers by providing high performance and high efficiency to the storage network simultaneously."