First-of-its-kind Hybrid Storage appliance?

With this new hybrid technology, Avere can now automatically tier data across four media types: RAM, SSD, SAS and SATA HDDs, delivering maximum performance for the hottest files, while at the same time moving cold data out of the performance tier and onto SATA to minimize costs and shrink the data storage footprint. Dynamic tiering assures that every block of file data is located in storage that matches its current level of activity. As a result, the new system is 40 percent faster than the FXT 3500, the company's previous top performer on the SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark test, and is far less costly than flash-only solutions.

"With the new FXT 3800, Avere continues to be on the cutting edge of file system storage innovation and gives companies a new way to think about the way they purchase data storage," said Benjamin Woo, analyst with Neuralytix. "Customers can now receive the greatest amount of flexibility and choice by leveraging all four media tiers of storage, while defining the performance and efficiency requirements based on the activity of the data."

The Avere FXT 3800 Edge filer contains 144GB of DRAM, 2GB NVRAM and 800GB of SSD to accelerate the read, write and metadata performance of most active data. It contains 7.8TB of 10k SAS HDDs to store a large working set of recently active data. The FXT 3800's 2x 10GbE and 6x 1GbE ports allow connectivity to clients and servers for high performance access to active data and to core filers for infrequently accessed data. Each unit can be clustered to other FXT Edge filers with scaling of up to 50 nodes for linear performance and high availability.

"The performance gains and cost benefits associated with our latest FXT Edge filer demonstrate the massive advantages of a hybrid approach that can precisely match the storage media to the data being accessed," said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. "And when deployed as part of our edge-core architecture, it also delivers the flexibility businesses need to locate storage where it makes most sense for the business."