Avere Systems has announced the release of its cloud storage solution Avere Cloud NAS, which integrates legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) with Amazon’s Glacier.
The company claims its latest product has built on the technology of previous releases to offer customers the freedom to store data anywhere, while separating performance and capacity to cut latency in accessing the data 98% of the time.
The inclusion of Avere FlashCloud technology means a company can swiftly move data between Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Glacier, its long-term storage, while retaining the necessary metadata to know which files are stored where.
"We are currently working with customers who have massive amounts of data who had never thought it was possible to leverage the cloud for more than a fraction of their storage," said Ron Bianchini, Avere CEO.
"Avere Cloud NAS eliminates the most serious technological challenges these customers face with moving to the cloud.
"Moreover, the combination of Avere with Amazon Web Services offerings gives them an enormous cost advantage over traditional storage models."
The company behind the special effects for the Sandra Bullock, George Clooney movie Gravity relied on Avere to render the graphics in the film.
And speaking to CBR before the release, Bianchini and Rebecca Thompson, VP of marketing, said the new product offers customers much more freedom in choosing the most suitable storage for their needs.
"It gives people a choice – they can choose between lots of different storage providers," said Thompson.
Bianchini added: "This flash move functionality allows you to migrate in and migrate out, there’s no vendor lock-in anymore. You can move things in and out at will."
He explained that since separating capacity and performance in a previous Avere release, companies have begun storing their repositories remotely.
"We have gotten a lot of interest from the cloud vendors to enable us to put our infrastructure in front of their repositories," he said.
"The exciting thing about this is we provide traditional enterprise NAS functionality – high performance, high availability, scalability, by adding nodes into our cluster, yet the repository can exist in their data centre or somewhere else."
The FlashCloud software also provides scalable performance and capacity, the latter enabling up to 450TB of active data to be stored on the enterprise premise to ensure a high ‘hit rate’ and low latency access to the data, the firm claimed.
Avere hopes to broaden its customer base from 100 (mainly US) with its new product release.
Bianchini said: "Amazon is introducing us to a lot of customers."
And Thompson added: "We’re still focused on larger enterprises. Our customers worry about price but also access to data which is critical and performance is key."
