Avere Systems - is it a cache, is it a tier, does it even matter?
- 3 minsThis post was previously hosted on a different site and then migrated here.
Very early into Avere’s presentation, after Avere referring to themselves as a ‘tiered file system’, the question was posed to them whether they really were providing tiering, or whether it was just a caching mechanism.
Now, I’m not going to go into this in depth, because a) Chris Evans has done that already here, and b) I don’t really think it matters that much, so let’s get into what they actually do…
Before Avere’s presentation, I was relatively unaware of their products, and it turns out that they provide a performance enhancing, appliance based overlay to multiple storage backends, be that public cloud object storage, legacy NAS arrays, or an On-Prem object store.
This not only increases performance, but dynamically moves data around based up the heat of that data (hence they cache vs tier question) and also based upon policies defined by the administrator. This automated migration of data is the holy grail for vendors right now, the big boys like NetApp are struggling to get there with FabricPools, and startups like Avere and Primary Data have beaten them to the punch here.
The tiered file system is pretty straight forward, so I won’t go too into it here, but the slide below evidences how that works architecturally.
Adding a NAS front end to an object store isn’t a new thing, but bundling that with a Flash Tier, and the ability to dynamically move data in and out of different clouds and platforms based upon usage, both removes some of the traditional latency and performance issues you might see with object storage, but also allows the enterprise an easy way to dive into “proper” cloud storage without re-architecting their applications or wildly changing their users’ consumption models.
Wrapping a total platform around these different kind of technologies is a ‘big thing’, for obvious reasons, and Avere really have a strong play here.
Avere recently announced their all-in-one solution for the modern datacentre, which they have coined Avere C2N - the Cloud-Core NAS System.
This solution will allow all the benefits of the appliance based model, but with baked in local NAS storage, too. I think this is a pretty compelling platform for a greenfield DC, but Avere have gained a lot of traction in the M&E vertical with this platform already, and I’m pretty sure that they’ll start to see adoption outside of this space too.
Object storage is so hot right now, I’m talking to customers about it on a daily basis, and I fully expect this adoption only to grow. Avere seem well placed to capitalize on this growth.
The full Avere presentations from Storage Field Day can also be found here.
Disclaimer: This blog is part of my series on Storage Field Day 11. I was personally invited to attend Storage Field Day 11 as an independent delegate, with GestaltIT covering my travel, accommodation, and the majority of my subsidence costs. However I was not compensated for my time. I am not required to blog on any content and blog posts are not edited or reviewed by the presenters or the respective companies prior to publication.
Ed Morgan
GTM Technical Lead @ Rubrik, I like the Cloud, automation, and picking heavy things up then putting them down again.