Avere Virtualizes Storage Infrastructure With Global Namespace

Avere Systems announced the introduction of global namespace (GNS) functionality across its FXT Scale-out NAS Appliance family in the newest release of the Avere operating system.

Avere GNS enables a single namespace view across all NAS storage servers throughout the enterprise, allowing the unification of islands of NAS from multiple vendors across multiple locations.

With Avere’s GNS, storage administrators can create and manage logical groupings of file-based resources regardless of physical location, presenting clients running NFS or CIFS with transparent access to data with a single mount point. Moreover, when data is moved from one storage server to another within the network, client access is rerouted with no disruption or downtime. GNS is available as part of the 2.0 release of the Avere operating system.

"With so many organizations looking to leverage the benefits associated with scale-out NAS, solutions that capitalize on the ability to bring together storage resources through a single global namespace should quickly become sought-after products in the storage marketplace," said Terri McClure, Senior Storage Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Avere has addressed the limitations of traditional NAS and has developed an approach to scale-out NAS that promises excellent performance and efficient economies of scale. Their new global namespace offering will provide a way to tame the NAS sprawl resulting from the enormous growth in unstructured data throughout organizations everywhere."

"Avere’s latest innovation comes from feedback with organizations that are looking for a way to streamline client access to data across disparate NAS systems and across geographical locations, including data stored in the cloud," said Ron Bianchini, Avere President and CEO. "Unlike existing solutions that only deliver a namespace across a single vendor’s products or those that created unacceptable performance bottlenecks, our global namespace solution unifies storage access across all NAS resources throughout the enterprise while delivering the performance and scalability upon which Avere has built its reputation."

Avere’s GNS is a part of the company’s A-3 Architecture, the technological foundation on which its solutions are built upon. This new storage virtualization capability joins Avere’s Tiered File System (TFS) – a file system designed from the ground up to be deployed on multiple storage tiers for maximum efficiency – its linear performance scaling via scale-out clustering and the visibility into data storage operations as a pillar of innovation for building out the next generation of NAS systems. The A-3 Architecture is delivered to users as part of its FXT Scale-out NAS Appliance family that drives performance, efficiency and visibility as well as reducing latency across the extended enterprise by uniting applications via non-disruptive scale-out NAS services.