Avere Unveils New FXT 2700

PITTSBURGH, January 26, 2009  Avere Systems, the company setting new performance benchmarks in tiered NAS with its Demand-Driven Storage solutions, today announced an extension to its recently unveiled FXT Series.

The introduction of the new FXT 2700 tiered NAS appliance leverages the extreme random read performance of Flash SSD to meet the highest application demands of performance-oriented customers and is the first from Avere to include an internal tier of Single Level Cell Flash Solid State Disk, delivering up to a 10x improvement in random read access for performance-critical applications such as 3D rendering, chip design and other CAD/CAE applications, database acceleration and seismic data analysis for the oil and gas industry, to name a few.  Deploying an Avere FXT 2700 appliance is a simple, fast and effective answer to the data access speed issue for these performance-centric users.

The FXT 2700 Series accommodates up to 13 terabytes Flash SSD across a 25-node cluster to significantly improve random read performance for customers whose data access requirements cannot be met with the latency imposed by the sequential nature of hard disk drives.

"Storage systems that optimize the use of HDD and SSD performance, throughput and capacity in an autonomous or near autonomous way can significantly lower management and storage ownership costs," said Stanley Zaffos, Research Vice President at Gartner.

"One of the main assumptions of Demand-Driven Storage is that data access requirements are different across applications," said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. "Applications that produce heavy random read workloads are best addressed by SSDs and the FXT 2700 is Avere's answer for those users who have a high-end NAS infrastructure that under delivers when it comes to these types of applications."

The most frequently accessed data is dynamically stored on a combination of DRAM, NVRAM and SLC Flash SSD tiers on the FXT 2700. As a customer's performance requirements change, additional FXT 2700 appliances can be added to the cluster to scale performance linearly.

FXT appliances dramatically accelerate performance of existing NAS installations with the innovative tiered NAS design enabled by the Avere OS, which constantly monitors and analyzes data access frequency patterns and workload type and automatically manages data placement on the appropriate storage tier to increase performance and distributes workloads across a cluster of FXT appliances.

The Avere FXT  2700 appliance comes in a 2U form factor and features 64GB of DRAM  (1.6 TB of DRAM per cluster), 1GB of NVRAM, and 512GB of SLC Flash SSD.  FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of operations/sec performance and tens of gigabytes/sec throughput. Each FXT 2700 appliance provides redundant power and network ports and is designed for high-bandwidth network access with either two 10GbE and two 1GbE network ports or ten 1GbE ports. The FXT 2700 is available now with list pricing starting at $82,500.