Ushering in the Hybrid Cloud Storage era

"The current storage ownership model is approximately two decades old, and has always favored the storage vendor. Consequently, storage buyers have found it difficult to change requirements as often as they'd like and reduce operational costs," said Ron Bianchini, Avere Systems president and CEO. "But now that we have reliable cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google, adequate security and software-defined file storage technology, we are now in a free-market economy for storage that will continue to drive down costs while improving storage options at a much faster rate than we've ever known before."

In a recent presentation to IT professionals, Bianchini outlined the three breakthroughs that are making this new hybrid-cloud storage world possible:

Enterprise NAS Performance in the Cloud
One of the primary inhibitors for widespread enterprise use of cloud-based storage is excessive latency, which is intolerable for organizations that have come to expect the performance of enterprise network attached storage (NAS). However, recent SPECsfs2008 NFS testing results prove that Avere is the first company to deliver enterprise NAS performance in a hybrid storage environment using the Amazon S3 cloud. "Put simply, we deploy Avere Edge Filers on-premises where the users are, which guarantees an enterprise NAS experience no matter where your data is stored," continued Bianchini.

Zero-pain Migrations
The next critical breakthrough is the ability to maintain application momentum while allowing enterprises to change storage configurations at will. "Historically, organizations could not migrate from on-premises NAS to a cloud storage model without the painful effort of rewriting all of their enterprise applications for cloud, and then testing them in the cloud to ensure they are functionally equivalent," added Bianchini. This process can slow down IT departments for months or years. But with software-defined file system technology from Avere, nothing has to be rewritten for the cloud, and it is now possible to make storage changes in real time, as business requirements change.

Effortless Provisioning -- Switch Vendors and Storage Options on the Fly
Now that cloud storage is a viable option, organizations do not have to rely on their corporate data centers as much. With less physical dependence on storage equipment and the ability to provision service at will, storage buyers are no longer beholden to a single vendor for three- to seven-year periods for all of their performance and capacity needs. Today, organizations can now have different vendors for each need, which creates an incredible amount of options where there was only one before. Just as enterprise IT departments are used to renting 1,000s of compute cores through Google or Amazon, they will soon be able to rent dynamic storage capacity as needed from a myriad of cloud providers, enabling IT professionals to make much smarter decisions based on performance, capacity and cost parameters.

"Avere Systems is ushering in the new era of enterprise-class hybrid storage, which is a boon to organizations that struggle with the cost and performance of managing on-premises and cloud file locations, while also deciding whether to use hard disk or solid state drive technology," said George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland. "Avere's technology enables its customers to select and provision storage options instantly, and this capability will drive new operational efficiencies and competitive advantages."