Avere Systems has announced several key improvements to the Avere OS, the engine that powers the FXT Series of NAS appliances. These improvements further enhance the performance and lower the cost structure of NAS environments by adding support for up to 24 mass storage systems, bi-modal CIFS ACL support and parallel file access.

Avere OS provides dynamic tiering for optimal data placement across multiple storage tiers, performance acceleration for any application workload, and clustering for performance scaling and availability. Avere OS support for industry-standard protocols, an intuitive user interface, and ease of administration enables the FXT Series to easily fit into existing storage infrastructures.

The latest Avere OS release includes support for 24 heterogeneous mass storage systems.  Now organizations can place a single Avere cluster in front of a large group of disparate filers to accelerate or handle hot spots in high-performance and/or unpredictable demand environments.  Moreover, with the all solid state FXT 2700, customers are able to add an extensible layer of SSD into their environments and harness the intelligence of clustered tiering to make the most economical use of it.

The Avere OS provides NFSv3 and CIFS file access interfaces to support applications running on Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac servers and clients.  Now CIFS users have a choice of how to implement access control lists (ACLs), either via standard CIFS ACLs or by mapping CIFS ACLs onto NFSv4. NFSv4 mapping is of particular interest to customers who wish to eliminate the cost and complexity of a CIFS infrastructure in their datacenter, while still providing CIFS access to end users.

Avere's dynamic storage tiering gives customers the ability to use the most efficient storage media possible and the ability to add nodes as storage access demand increases.  The end result is linear performance scaling that is decoupled from capacity growth.  New enhancements to its tiering algorithms now allow parallel file access by implementing the ability to stripe and replicate files across nodes within a cluster in high demand, high bandwidth scenarios.

"The improvements we have made to the Avere OS are both a demonstration of our commitment to provide companies the means to build and scale their NAS environment in the most efficient manner possible as well as a response to what our customers were asking for in using our solution as an integral part of their total storage infrastructure," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems.