Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 6.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day and their sponsors. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

For each of the presentations I attended at SFD6, there are a few things I want to include in the post. Firstly, you can see video footage of the Avere presentation here. You can also download my raw notes from the presentation here. Finally, here’s a link to the Avere website that covers some of what they presented.

Avere’s stated goal is to “[r]einvent storage with a Hybrid Cloud NAS solution that integrates public and private object storage with legacy NAS into a single, cost-effective pool with scalable performance for users everywhere”. I haven’t had a lot to do with Avere previously, and I’m generally less than enthusiastic about systems that add another layer of abstraction to storage infrastructure. However, one of the cooler use cases for Avere is the support for EC2 compute with on-premises storage access. I have a bunch of clients that are keen as beans to access cloud compute for certain workloads but are restricted by what data they can have in the cloud.

Avere also recently made some announcements about their virtual FXT Edge Filer which I think is going to open things up for them in this space. Check out Eric’s post for an interesting perspective on Avere’s offering. Also, have a look at this blog post from Gretchen Weaver on what cloud NAS is. Thanks to Avere for taking the time to shed some light on their products.