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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
- editor's comments:- 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.
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| the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs |
Repeating write
operations in some apps
and some flash SSDs can take orders of
magnitude longer than predicted
by IOPS
benchmarks and latency specs.
Time goes by - in the "play
it again Sam"
scene intrinsic to databases - discrediting
long
established performance modeling metrics. | |
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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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