31 July 2010
Saturday
Avere adds flash SSD support to its FXT series
By Beth Pariseau | Feb 1, 2010
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PrintAs it pledged when it first shipped products last October, automated tiered storage startup Avere Inc. is shipping flash solid-state drives (SSDs) for use in its FXT Series clustered NAS appliances.
Avere this week said it qualified Intel Corp.'s 64 GB X25-E single level cell (SLC) SSDs in a new appliance called the FXT 2700, which follows the first two FXT Series nodes Avere shipped late last year with SAS drives. The FXT 2700 will ship with SSDs and no hard disk drives, 64 GB of DRAM, 1 GB NVRAM and up to 512 GB flash capacity per appliance. FXT clusters scale to 25 nodes, which would hold up to 13 TB of flash capacity. The 2700 appliance also offers a choice between two 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and 10 GigE connections. The Avere FXT 2700 became available this week with a starting list price of $82,500 per appliance.
Last October, Avere launched FXT 2300 and FXT 2500 appliance nodes with 64 GB of read-only DRAM and 1 GB of battery-backed NVRAM. The FXT 2300, list priced at $52,000, contains 1.2 TB of 15,000 rpm SAS drives. The FXT 2500, at $72,000, contains 3.5 TB of SAS disk. The nodes can scale out under a global namespace, and the clustered NAS system can be attached to third-party NFS NAS systems for archival and backup storage.
While the FXT 2300 and FXT 2500 hold mixed tiers of RAM-based solid-state storage and 15,000 rpm SAS drives, director of product marketing Jeff Tabor said the FXT 2700 will have to be deployed separately, at least until another release later this year.
"Data center customers have 15,000 rpm drives already," Tabor said. "What they want is SSD and 10-Gig [Ethernet] interfaces."
Avere positions the device for use cases where working sets are large enough to exceed practical RAM capacities. "You can get 10 times the performance when you use flash compared with hard disk drives," Tabor said.
One early adopter said the big appeal of Avere is the ability to repurpose older bulk NAS storage behind its clustered NAS. Bryan Nielsen, technology systems architect at the Salk Institute's Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, said at $82,500 (the list price per FXT 2700 appliance), solid-state storage doesn't fit his budget. "We gain enough benefit from the faster drives in their other appliances," he said.
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
