Avere FXT Series appliances are the first-ever solution to bring the benefits of performance tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS environment. The FXT Series provides NAS Optimization by enabling customers to achieve unlimited performance scaling for their applications, global access to their data independent of where the storage is located, and dramatic cost savings in both capital and operating expenses.
Challenge
Traditional NAS solutions have created four major pain-points for customers: 1) Over-provisioning of disk drives is expensive and wastes lots of power and space. 2) Scaling performance is difficult and comes with expensive upgrades, more disks, and application downtime. 3) There is no simple way to provide global access to the data. 4) NAS sprawl, which results from scaling limitations, highly complicates management. With Avere, however, there is a better way.
Solution
Avere optimizes NAS by separating performance scaling from capacity scaling and more effectively delivers both. The FXT Series provides the NAS optimization features needed to address the above challenges: 1) Dynamic tiering places data on the optimal storage media and dramatically reduces costs. 2) Scale-out clustering delivers linear performance scaling. 3) WAN caching provides global data access and enables building a NAS cloud. 4) Virtualization and visibility enable managing all NAS devices as a single logical pool.
Reduce Costs
Avere solutions are highly efficient and typically require 80% less total equipment than traditional NAS. For existing NAS deployments, the FXT Series enables administrators to dramatically increase the performance of their systems without adding storage. For new deployments, the FXT Series enables administrators to meet their performance requirements with the highest possible storage density using low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives.
Scale Performance
The Avere FXT Series supports up to 50 appliances per cluster and linearly scales to millions of ops/sec performance and tens of GB/sec throughput. The FXT cluster takes ownership of heavily accessed files from the mass storage system and accelerates all operations to those files including reads, writes, and metadata operations. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliance constantly monitor data access patterns and actively manage data placement to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster, and minimize accesses to the mass storage systems.
Enable NAS Cloud
Cloud storage is attractive because it promises to deliver lower costs through a consolidated and centrally managed architecture. To date, however, cloud storage has been impractical for many applications because the high-latency WAN connection between the cloud provider and the cloud user has resulted in poor performance. Avere enables cloud storage for NAS applications demanding moderate to high performance by caching active data on FXT appliances near the user, eliminating the latency of the WAN.
Virtualization & Visibility
Avere supports multiple, heterogeneous mass storage systems per FXT cluster and, with built-in global namespace functionality, enables accessing all systems through a single mount point and managing all systems as though they were one. The Avere user interface lets you visualize your entire NAS environment like never before, providing a wealth of statistics and graphical display on the operations of all NAS clients and storage.