This article is more than 1 year old

Avere: You're going to see tighter integration between us and Google

On-premises data centre not such a big deal any more, it seems

Analysis NAS acceleration and cloud on-ramp supplier Avere is facing a surging cloud on-ramp business, now at parity with its data centre business, and growing much faster, with a Google relationship looking key.

Avere makes FXT filers which are a multi-tiered (RAM-to-flash-to-disk, etc) products featuring fine-grained IO type granularity to cache NAS data accesses and have been typically used to accelerate ageing filers. The technology proved a good fit with sending data to and from public clouds, and also for accelerating file accesses for compute processes running in the cloud accessing files in the cloud.

The filer acceleration is the core of its on-premises data centre business and this was the main part of its business until recently. CEO and co-founder and President Ron Bianchini told an IT Press Tour in Palo Alto that "Growth in our cloud business is just insane, 100 per cent and higher."

We understand this is year-on-year quarterly growth. He said Avere had enjoyed triple digit growth in its cloud on-ramp business for five quarters in a row. It's now at parity with the data centre business but growing much faster and could be Avere's major revenue earner in the future.

Why?

Bianchini thinks Avere has a CAP advantage. The CAP* theorem says it's not possible for a distributed computer system to possess consistency, availability and partition-tolerance simultaneously; it can only have any two of these.

Avere says a NAS system has POSIX compliance and consistency. The public cloud and object storage have availability but only eventual consistency, and contrasts with NAS' high consistency. POSIX semantics mean read after write consistency.

What Avere does is front-end the public cloud with a NAS system – its FXT product – and thus effectively combine NAS and the public cloud to produce an overall system with all three capabilities: consistency, availability and partition-tolerance.

The NAS front-end will, for example, not read newly written data from the cloud until it is consistent. Bianchini says that edge-core with Avere and the cloud has highly consistent storage at edge while the core is a highly available object store in the cloud.

In March Google made a direct investment in Avere, contributing to a funding round. Bianchini said: "I think you're going to see tighter and tighter integration between us and Google," adding: "Avere is the ultimate cloud on-ramp."

What might be coming?

Google is coming from behind AWS and Azure in providing enterprise cloud services. It wants more enterprise data in its cloud.

Avere could be great way to store data in the Google cloud as in backup and archive-type applications. If it offered a service to do this that then every data write to the cloud would get an ingress charge and every read would get an egress charge, billed to Avere. That's nasty.

If that could be avoided then it could be a huge business for Avere. big. So ... suppose Google OEMs/resells Avere's product to start getting customers sending data to the cloud, then that would be huge for Avere and Google would absorb the data ingress/egress charges. QED? Maybe. Watch this space. ®

* The CAP theorem states that any networked shared-data system can have at most two of three desirable properties:

  • Consistency - equivalent to having a single up-to-date copy of the data,
  • high availability of that data (for updates),
  • tolerance to network Partitions.

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like