Complete Solutions for Improving Performance and Reducing the Cost of NAS in the Data Center
Avere Systems NAS Optimization solutions improve the performance and reduce the cost of data center NAS deployments. Avere’s FXT Series of tiered NAS appliances separate performance scaling from capacity scaling to more efficiently deliver both. Performance scaling is provided by a cluster of FXT Series appliances. Capacity scaling is provided by third-party NAS systems or, in Avere terms, mass storage systems. Together, this two-stage NAS architecture provides ultimate flexibility, allowing your organization to grow your storage along with your business.
FXT appliances provide unique functionality for scaling performance:
- Intelligent tiering moves active data to the RAM, Flash/SSD, and 15k SAS media internal to FXT appliances for improved performance
- Clustering enables up to 50 FXT appliances to be joined in a single system, pooling the cluster-wide RAM, Flash/SSD, and 15k SAS resources
- Read, write, and metadata operations are accelerated, delivering performance of up to millions of operations per second and throughput of tens of GB per second at very low latency.
Avere has qualified a variety of 3rd-party products to provide you with the ability to select the mass storage system(s) that best fits your requirements. You choose the mass storage systems that best matches the cost, data retention functionality, and manageability requirements for your applications. FXT appliances can support up to 24 mass storage systems per cluster and allow mixing of mass storage systems from different vendors on the same FXT cluster, providing maximum flexibility.
Scale Performance in IO Intensive Environments
Demand for application performance constantly grows; with traditional NAS, this leads to islands of storage, changing hot spots, and management difficulties due to data sprawl. Avere FXT appliances support clustering to enable precise sizing for arbitrary performance requirements and seamless growth as performance demand increases over time. An FXT cluster is the perfect complement to traditional NAS and brings clustering to non-clustered storage. Avere also enhances clustered NAS by adding a highly responsive performance tier that hides the high latency of many clustered NAS implementations.
Build Highly Efficient Data Centers
Because Avere offloads performance onto the FXT cluster, mass storage systems can be optimized for cost, space, and power. With Avere it is no longer necessary to buy the highest-end NAS controllers and fastest 15k drives for the mass storage systems. Nor is it necessary to overprovision and short-stroke disks or otherwise limit the amount of data on a NAS controller for performance reasons. Rather, cost-effective lower-end NAS controllers and dense SATA drives can be used and all controllers can be provisioned to their maximum disk capacity. Using the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, Avere demonstrated the ability to deliver high performance with a 5:1 reduction in disks, power, and space when compared to competitive solutions.
Reduce Latency to Remote Offices
With Avere, you can extend the benefits of tiered NAS - performance, scalability, cost savings, and ease of management - that you receive in the data center to the remote locations and enable a private cloud. See our Cloud Solutions for more details.
Extend the Life of Existing NAS
Upgrading existing NAS systems is expensive and disruptive. A typical upgrade is expensive because it requires purchasing new high-end NAS controllers, more expensive software licenses, and additional 15k disk drives. Upgrades are disruptive because they require taking systems offline, swapping controllers, and migrating users to the new controller. Avere FXT appliances allow extending the life of exiting NAS systems at lower cost and with less disruption. FXT appliances can be seamlessly added in front of any NAS system, instantly boosting the performance. Over time, as performance demand grows, additional FXT appliances can be added to the cluster without the need to rip out and replace hardware. When more capacity is needed, SATA drives can be used at much lower cost and higher density than 15k drives.
Learn More
Visit our Applications and Industry solution sections to learn more about the benefits an Avere solution can bring to your environment, To find out more about the technology and specific products, please see our Products section.
For additional questions and/or examples, please see our Resources section or contact us directly.