Thursday, October 15, 2009

Avere does not however want to replace your existing NAS hardware, just change its role. Essentially Avere is going to count on the existing NAS environment as something it trickles older data to as it is not being accessed. All data eventually lands on the existing NAS and all data protection and NAS management occurs from there. This allows the Avere team to focus their system on optimal data placement and optimal storage I/O performance.

At the show Avere announced its SPECsfs2008 results and demonstrated chart toping performance as well as exposed some points that users need to be carful with when looking at SPECsfs2008 testing.

Results were achieved during testing of Avere FXT 2500 appliances using the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 benchmark in 1-, 2- and 6-node FXT configurations. With the 6-node configuration requiring just 79 disks, the system achieved a record-setting combination of 131,591 ops/sec throughput and minimal latency of 1.38ms ORT (overall response time). Results for the 1-, 2-, and 6-node configurations fully demonstrate the ability of FXT systems to provide linear performance scaling through clustering, delivering greater than 21.9K ops/sec per FXT node while maintaining 1.38ms or less ORT. When comparing all SPECsfs2008 results that achieved greater than 100k ops/sec throughput, Avere provided five times more ops/sec per disk than the other vendors.

Avere achieved these results with reasonable systems, not overloading the test with not in the real world drive counts or filesystem counts like some supplier do.

George Crump, Senior Analyst