Avere 3.0 provides fast and scalable file server
SSG-NOW Subscription Content
When we first reported on the all solid-state Avere FXT 2700 1.0 a little over two years ago, we were impressed by its performance and scalability. Two or more nodes of Avere appliances could create a cluster in order to match customer requirements for high availability, capacity and throughput. Version 2.0 of the software brought the ability to operate a global namespace from the cluster. Both versions 1.0 and 2.0 required a NAS filer, or farm of them, operating behind the Avere cluster. The systems provided NAS acceleration because, if the working set primarily resides in the cluster, reads and writes could be served up quickly from the Avere cluster without waiting for the backend, or ‘Core’ filers, which could be synchronized as a background operation. This typically results in a 50 to 1 reduction in traffic to the Core filers, with only two percent of traffic going over the network. Now with Avere 3.0, the Avere cluster becomes the namespace authority. Files are accessed from the Avere system and interaction with the Core filers becomes transparent to the users. This dramatically reduces network latency and simplifies the management of the entire system. The Avere namespace authority also allows dramatic new capabilities called FlashMove and FlashMirror.
