Avere Systems present their FXT series NAS frontends

Avere Systems, a relatively new storage startup that announced they received their first round of funding only a month ago, has announced the availability of their first two products: the FXT 2300 and FXT 2500. I’ve had a quick look at the whitepaper they published about their architecture, and it looks like a good strategy.

In fact, the product is exactly what I earlier thought Dataram would offer; a cache that sits between your traditional NAS filers and clients accessing it. Both models offer eight 15k rpm SAS drives; the FXT 2300 uses 145GB drives, while the FXT 2500 has 450GB disks. To provide even better performance, both models have 64GB of (D)RAM for caching reads, and 1GB of NVRAM for storing data that is actively written to. Networking is handled by either two 10Gbps and two 1 Gbps Ethernet interfaces, of ten 1Gbps ports.

The appliances automatically store the most-accessed data on their local disks/NVRAM/DRAM; less-used data is offloaded to a traditional NAS that sits behind the FXT unit(s). Up to 25 FXT systems can be added to a single cluster, pooling their storage and bandwidth; N+1 redundancy can be configured if needed. Since the most-accessed data is detected automatically, configuration is limited, and performance gains should be visible fairly soon.

“The FXT Series is a milestone in the evolution of storage products with its dynamic use of storage media to maximize speed while minimizing cost,” said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. “The end-result is a product line that can deliver tremendous business value to customers by providing high performance and high efficiency to the storage network simultaneously.

If I understand their whitepaper correctly, the systems can currently only access file servers using NFSv3; the same goes for exporting filesystems to clients. A client interface for CIFS clients is “optional”.

The FXT units can operate in three modes:

• Write-back mode is the normal mode, in which both reads and writes of the “active” data set are performed from and to the FXT cluster. Updated data is written back to the back-end NAS at predetermined intervals.
• In write-through mode the FXT cluster only caches reads, and all writes are sent to the back-end NAS immediately.
• Write-around mode effectively disables caching. Writes are handled as in write-through mode; in addition to that, before each read operation the attributes of a file are checked on the back-end NAS to make sure the cached copy is still up-to-date

Write-around mode can be used when migrating to the Avere solution; the FXT units are configured in this mode, clients can be migrated to connect to them, and once all clients connect directly to the FXTs they can be set to write-back mode to get their full performance benefits (“millions of IOPS”, according to Avere).

All things considered it looks like a pretty solid architecture for a first-generation product, and I’m looking forward to seeing some hands-on reviews.

Related posts:

1. Avere Systems shows first benchmarks
2. Dataram launches SAN caching appliance
3. Iomega offers SMB NAS appliance with VMware certification
4. Iomega adds smaller VMware certified NAS to their lineup
5. IBM adds new storage system to DS8000 series