Avere Systems

Avere Systems, Inc
Private
Founded 2008
Founder Ronald Bianchini, Jr.
Michael L. Kazar
Dan Nydick
Headquarters 910 River Avenue
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people
 Ronald Bianchini, Jr. (President and CEO)
Michael L. Kazar (CTO)
Products FXT Series, Avere OS, Flashmove, Flashmirror, Flashcloud

Avere Systems Incorporated is a privately held enterprise storage and data management company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the United States of America.

History

Avere Systems was founded in 2008 by Ronald Bianchini, Jr., Ph.D., Michael L. Kazar, Ph.D and Dan Nydick. In December 2008, Avere raised a $15 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures[1] and Norwest Venture Partners.[2] In August 2010, Avere raised $17 million,[3] led by Tenaya Capital [4] with participation of existing investors. In July 2012, Avere raised $20 million,[5] led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.[6] The company most recently announced that it raised an additional $20 million in venture financing, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $72 million. The Series D funding round was led by Western Digital Capital, with participation from previous investors.[7]

Products and technology

Avere Systems released its first FXT Series storage appliances in November 2009.[8] Each appliance contains a mix of storage media, to include: DRAM, NVRAM, SSD and SAS HDDs. These hybrid array appliances are used to form a storage cluster of up to 50 nodes using a clustered file system. The FXT nodes act as write-back cache devices that sit in front of NAS filers or object storage and are the mount point for computing clients sending file requests using NFS or CIFS/SMB protocols.

Automated storage tiering is used to move active data to the different types of storage media contained within the FXT cluster for optimized performance when fulfilling client access requests and inactive data is eventually migrated to NAS filers or object storage located on-premises or in a remote data center or to AWS S3 and AWS Glacier public cloud services. The company launched a virtual version of its filer, called the Virtual FXT Edge filer (vFXT) to enable customers to use cloud compute without moving data from on-premises storage.[9]

A single Avere cluster can connect to up to 50 heterogeneous storage filers and creates a Global Namespace for unified data access and management.[10] Additional licensable software allows movement of data between storage filers for load balancing, bringing new storage filers online, or removing old storage filers without taking any resources offline. Mirroring functionality replicates the data moved onto one storage filer to a secondary filer for disaster recovery purposes.

Avere’s products are used in the film industry in the storage network for rendering special effects, including 3-D rendering as well as transcoding and compositing. Some of the customers that use Avere to assist in the production of visual effects include: Dreamworks,[11] Digital Domain,[12] Image Engine [13] and Framestore, who used Avere’s products to support the effects in the film Gravity which won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.[14] The Library of Congress uses Avere in its storage network for access to images and other digital resources requested by site visitors.[15] The largest web hosting company in Brazil,[16] Locaweb, uses Avere products as an integral part of its storage infrastructure in multiple data centers in Brazil and Miami.[17] In November 2014, Avere announced selection by the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) Office of Infectious Diseases (OID) to power its genomic sequencing storage environment.[18]

Awards and recognition

Avere Systems won Best Creative Industry Project of the Year by the UK IT Industry Awards in 2013 for its work with Framestore on Gravity.[19] Avere was named the winner of the Solution Provider of the Year in the 2013 Tech 50 Awards.[20] CRN Magazine selected Avere Systems as one of 25 "hot emerging companies" in 2013.[21] Avere also is a 2014 Red Herring North American Award Winner.[22] Avere Systems and its CEO, Ronald Bianchini Jr. won the Carnegie Science Award for Information Technology in 2014.[23][24] Co-founder Michael L. Kazar was the recipient of IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award for his contributions to information storage systems.[25]

Avere is a member of the Standards Performance Evaluation Corporation and has achieved several benchmarks in the SPEC sfs2008 NFS category for record performance and for achieving performance speeds equivalent to on-premises storage but with cloud providers as the core storage system for the first time in SPEC sfs2008 history. These results were demonstrated with AWS, Cleversafe and Amplidata.[26]

In 2014, Avere was named as one of Pittsburgh's Top Workplaces in the small business category.[27]

References

  1. ↑ "Menlo Ventures Portfolio". Menlo Ventures. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  2. ↑ "Norwest Venture Portfolio". Norwest Venture Portfolio. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  3. ↑ "Avere Closes $17 Million Series B Funding Round". Eweek.com. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  4. ↑ "Tenaya Capital Portfolio". Tenaya Capital. 2014. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  5. ↑ "Avere Raises 20 million in Series C funding". LSVP. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  6. ↑ "LSVP Enterprise Portfolio". LSVP. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  7. ↑ "AVERE SYSTEMS CRACKS THE CODE FOR HYBRID CLOUD STORAGE; RAISES $20 MILLION TO ACCELERATE GROWTH". AvereSystems.com. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  8. ↑ "Storage News - October 2009, week 1". Storage Search. 2009. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  9. ↑ . EnterpriseTech http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/05/avere-introduces-virtual-fxt-edge-filer/. Retrieved 5 February 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. ↑ "The Avere Architecture for Tiered Nas". Exclusive Networks. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  11. ↑ "Dreamworks' Storage Tiers Help Animate Movie Making". Search Storage. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  12. ↑ "Private NAS Cloud Saves Digital Production Studio Millions of Dollars". Search Storage. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  13. ↑ "The Hidden Data Magic Behind 'Zero Dark Thirty'". Bloomberg. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  14. ↑ "Avere Systems Keeps CGI specialists Framestore Rolling". Computing.co.uk. 2012. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  15. ↑ "Avere Wins Library of Congress Data Storage Deal". Bizjournals.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  16. ↑ "Silver Lake Takes Stake in Brazil’s Locaweb". Bizjournals.com. 2010. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  17. ↑ "Silver Lake Takes Stake in Brazil’s Locaweb". Webhostinghero.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  18. ↑ averesystems.com. Avere Systems http://www.averesystems.com/news-and-events/the-centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention-selects-avere-hybrid-cloud-solution-to-support-its-next-generation-genomic-sequencing-environment. Retrieved 5 February 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  19. ↑ "UK IT Industry Awards 2013". Webhostinghero.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  20. ↑ "Pittsburgh Technology Council's Tech 50 Awards Celebrate Innovation". Post-Gazette.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  21. ↑ "Emerging Vendors 2013: Storage Vendors: Page 5 of 33". CRN.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  22. ↑ "2014 Red Herring North America Winners".
  23. ↑ "Cohon, Nordenberg lead winners of Carnegie Science Awards for Universities' Collaboration". CRN.com. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  24. ↑ "Carnegie Science Center Awardees".
  25. ↑ "IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award Recipients". IEEE.org. 2013. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  26. ↑ "All Published SPEC SFS2008 Results".
  27. ↑ "Top Workplaces discover the 'secret' to a content workforce". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 26 October 2014.

External links