Avere: to the edge and beyond
Sometimes when you hear about a product, it makes you feel positive the first you hear of it. I had that feeling about Avere last year during Storage Field Day 4 when Ron Bianchini told us about the Avere FXT product, and everything that a company could accomplish using FXT. If you’re not familiar with Avere it might be a good idea to watch the SFD4 videos first, which I’ll include in this post first:
Overview on Avere Systems:
Ron Bianchini’s Overview of Avere Systems from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
Introduction to Avere Cloud NAS:
Avere Systems Cloud NAS Introduction from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
Avere Systems Use Cases:
Avere Systems Use Cases from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
Hearing and watching these videos again I had a great feeling on the Avere Sytems offering and wrote a blog post on my thoughts of what I heard during this presentation. You can find my thoughts here:
Accelerate your cloud with Avere
During Storage Field Day 6 we had another presentation by Avere and although some of the technology is still a very interesting product, this time around we got an announcement on the brand new virtual FXT product for AWS, and it makes sense but I would like to see more of a company like Avere Systems.
Where a lot of the Avere customers are using FXT to accelerate their local NAS systems, the great potential of FXT is to be the edge filer for cloud object stores. And that’s where IMO Avere has a great potential in US based countries, but none (for now) in countries outside the US border (Law). Simply because the FXT product only talks Amazon S3 and that’s just not happening in many countries outside the US for large interlectual property of companies.
The same thing goes for the virtual FXT product, which is a promising product, but also only available on AWS. This is a problem for many of the companies I’m consulting for. They are thinking of cloud, but when it comes to the patriot act and making sure their data stays within the borders of HQ, AWS is just not happening.
So what is this virtual FXT all about?
Avere Systems virtual FXT is a way to accelerate your reads/writes in your AWS compute infrastructure. Simply put it’s the FXT software for the cloud. Awesome when you’re looking purely at the technology, but as already said it’s AWS only.
Some great information on the virtual Avere FXT product can be found on juku.it:
http://juku.it/en/systems-great-technology-but/
And on architecting.it:
The great thing of the Tech Field Day events is that everything is recorded and can be watched whenever you want 
Here are all the videos of the Avere Systems Storage Field Day 6 presentation:
Reinventing Storage with Avere Systems:
Avere Systems Introduces Virtual FXT:
Cloudbursting Use Cases with Avere Systems:
Avere Virtual FXT Demonstrations:
Avere Virtual FXT Demonstrations from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.
to conclude:
I really think there is a lot of potential for Avere sytems and the products they make. They should however be more hypervisor/cloud agnostic and make sure a customer has a choice. Making this available for VMware, Microsoft, KVM and other Cloud solutions that are more standard and also provide the opportunity for country local cloud providers is a big gain for Avere if you ask me.
A couple of delegates also shared their thoughts on Avere systems presentation and can be found here:
http://www.penguinpunk.net/blog/storage-field-day-6-day-1-avere/
http://faststorage.eu/storage-field-day-6-day-1-avere-stormagic-tegile/
Disclaimer: I was invited to this event by the GestaltIT and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me (Arjan Timmerman).