Webinar: Untethering Compute from Storage

Editor's Notes

1. Next let’s talk about the consolidated management benefit that Avere provides. An important part of this is our global namespace that allows joining many NAS systems, even ones from multiple heterogeneous vendors, into a single file system namespace. Rather than having each of your clients mount multiple different NAS systems, your clients can have a single mount point on Avere and then the Avere FXT edge filer maps all the NAS systems into a single global namespace. These core filers can be in the same data center as the Avere cluster or in a different geography connected over a WAN. There are some other GNS solutions available in the market (for example Acopia ARX) but ours is unique in that it is very easy to install in an existing NAS environment. (It’s also easy to remove if necessary.) We are also unique because we simultaneously provide both GNS and performance acceleration. Other GNS solutions have a negative impact on performance. With the GNS in place, we can provide transparent data migration. This enables moving data between core filers either for the purpose of load balancing or adding new storage or moving data to an archive. (CLICK) The data movement physical moves the data between storage systems but the data remains in the same logical location due to our GNS so the movement is non-disruptive to clients and applications. We also provide mirroring which enables implementing DR. (CLICK) In this example the /cust export is mirrored to both a primary storage system (NetApp in this case) and a secondary storage systems (EMC Isilon in this case) location in a remote DR site. FlashMirror creates a baseline copy of /cust from the primary to the secondary and then from that point forward all changes to /cust are made on both the primary and secondary.
2. Avere has delivered performance acceleration and scaling to many different customers in many different industries and applications. This includes applications such as VMware, Oracle, rendering, transcoding, software build, chip design and verification, seismic processing, financial simulations, genomic sequencing, and more. This is a place in the presentation where you may want to insert a customer case study from our library that is relevant to the audience of your presentation. In the standard presentation we used the SPEC SFS benchmark since it is the most relevant workload across the broad range of customers we sell to. In the world of file systems there is a well know benchmark called SPEC SFS that is used to compare the performance of NAS systems. All the NAS vendors use the benchmark and post their results on the website shown at the bottom of this slide. SPEC does a great job of providing a detailed, apples-to-apples comparison of NAS products running in a “typical” enterprise-class NAS environment. This slides compares the three top performance results on the SPEC site. Avere is the current record holder with almost 1.6 million ops/sec achieved on a 44-node FXT cluster. Note that this is not a max cluster from Avere. We used just enough nodes to achieve the top spot. Today we can go to 50 nodes per cluster and will go beyond this in the future. In second place is NetApp with a max 24-node cluster mode system. In third place is EMC/Isilon with a max 140-node system S-Series cluster. While achieving the highest performance was an important point for Avere, our primary point was the efficiency of our solution. Just look at the sizes of the systems. We are faster than NetApp and Isilon in just a fraction of the space. 2.5 racks and 6 feet wide for us. 14 feet wide for Isilon. 24 feet wide for NetApp. If you scan across the orange row you can see the details of our performance advantage and our higher efficiency. Avere is the highest performance, the lowest latency, the lowest cost, and use the least amount of space and power.