Lately the European storage industry used a couple of IT shows to demonstrate just how much new life there is in new storage vendors. One of which was Avere at SNW in Frankfurt.
The Avere executives has brought many years of experience from distributed files systems and clustering to bear in optimised NAS storage and the Avere FXT series. Avere employs a Tiered File System on which its appliances use RAM, SSD and SAS which in turn sits in front of conventional NAS filers.
The proposition by Avere is that by using components with different performance characteristics, the Avere file system combined with scale-out clustering delivers much higher performance across the entire NAS solution. The Avere solution also adds a simplified management layer compared to traditional NAS. Further, in a geographically distributed setup the nature of a solution based on Avere can mitigate the latency penalties which performance traditionally suffers from.
The Avere solution appeals to larger NAS customers, but that still constitutes a large potential market. Which explains why example why still more storage vendors get start-up funding by VCs. Avere completed its round B funding in August of 2010.
