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Avere provides Demand-Driven Storage™ solutions that
dynamically organize data in response to business demand. The Avere FXT series
enables faster application performance at dramatically lower cost by
intelligently moving active data between traditional storage devices and FXT
appliances. The FXT series appliances tier data on SSD and HDD media and can be
clustered for maximum scalability. www.averesystems.com
see also:-
Avere
Systems - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com,
Avere's SSDs in NAS blog
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In October 2009 -
Avere Systems unveiled
its FXT Series of
clusterable 2U rackmount
hybrid
NAS appliances (SSD ASAPs).
Each
module contains upto 8x 3.5"
SAS
hard drives, 64GB
DRAM and 1GB of
nv RAM. The embedded
Avere OS
provides storage acceleration by dynamically tiering between the internal
rotating and solid state storage. List pricing starts at $52,500.
Avere is the 3rd company in recent weeks to announce an automatic
solution for the age old problem of
accelerating legacy
hard disk array applications with solid state storage. There are some
interesting differences in approach and target markets.
Avere's product is aimed
at NAS systems.
It's a complete end user solution which includes the hard disks which are to be
accelerated. Avere says the new product can be configured with upto 1.6TB of
DRAM per cluster.
Dataram's
product is aimed at SAN
systems. It's an end user upgrade solution which fits between the
customer's FC switch and
pre-existing SAN rotating storage arrays. In some cases where users have already
over provisioned hard disks - the
XcelaSAN
may also, as a side effect, increase the usable storage capacity as well as
speed up the apps.
Adaptec's
product is aimed at DAS
systems. The
MaxIQ
SSD Cache Performance Kit is an integrator / oem solution which
simplifies the task of building a hybrid storage pool.
Key questions
for customers with this new wave of self tuning SSD accelerators are going
to be:-
- How does the price / performance compare to vanilla
SSDs and human tuning?
- And how
reliable are the
new products going to be?
Understanding the
failure modes in
large SSD arrays is not something that traditional storage designers know
very much about.
In September 2009 -
Avere Systems
announced it has
secured $15
million in Series A funding
from Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Avere founders were
members of the team that created
Spinnaker Networks,
an innovator in scalable grid storage solutions,
acquired by
NetApp in 2004 for
$300 million.
In December 2009 -
Avere Systems' CEO,
Ron Bianchini contributed his expert opinions to a new article penned
by the editor of StorageSearch.com -
the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs.
In January 2010 -
Avere Systems
announced
it is shipping new
SLC
flash SSD options in its
FXT Series
10GbE NAS compatible
SSD ASAPs. The 2U
FXT 2700 appliance features 64GB of DRAM, 1GB of NVRAM, and 512GB of SLC flash
SSD. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of
operations/sec and tens of GB/sec throughput. Pricing starting at $82,500.
In
April 2010 - SSD
companies Avere Systems
and Pliant Technology
were 2 of 5 companies named in an 8 page report published by
Gartner -
Cool Vendors in
Storage Technologies, 2010 ($495). |
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the Problem with
Write IOPS
the "play it again Sam" syndrome |
Editor:- Flash SSD "random
write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the
fastest SSDs.
So
why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?
And
why are users still buying
RAM SSDs which cost
9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar. |
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This article tells you
why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs
with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely
differently. ...read
the article | | | |
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Now we're well and
truly in the SSD market
bubble there are thousands of websites which talk about SSDs.
But
how can you tell the good ones from the bad ones - which frankly don't
understand the market or the technology?
You already know about
StorageSearch.com - the most
respected site on the subject of solid state drives - which we have covered
extensively since the 1990s.
But what about other good SSD sites and
articles?
I asked SSD industry leaders to name their own favorites
and tell our readers why you should look too.
They're busy people -
running their companies and making the SSD future happen sooner. But they all
agree with me that better
understanding
about the SSD market is an important factor in its success.
I always
look forward to seeing these suggestions.
The
SSD Bookmarks series
will take you to new quality sites and articles which you may not have seen
before. | | |
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| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 3 types of
SSD in the datacenter.
One
of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage SSD.
It will replace the
last remaining strongholds of
hard drives in the
datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs
and operational advantages. |
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... |
The new model of the
datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which
will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this
visionary article. | | | | |
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