Avere Demos Cloud Performance With S3 in Storage Benchmark

Avere Systems, Inc. has posted the first SPECsfs2008 NFS.v.3 results using a public cloud storage service as persistent storage.

The results prove that with an edge-core storage architecture, the cloud can replace traditional storage arrays as the repository for corporate data.

Avere’s FXT Edge filers with FlashCloud for Amazon S3 from AWS provided cloud NAS storage that enabled the performance scalability via familiar NAS protocols on customer premises at the edge of the storage network, while leveraging object-based cloud storage services provided by S3, in the core of the storage network. The use of S3 eliminated the need for owning, provisioning and managing the storage capacity.

“Until now, public cloud storage has been used primarily for backup and archive applications because of poor performance due to latency imposed by the physical distance of the data center to the cloud, and the simple gateway products used to translate file to object protocols are not designed to handle the demands of enterprise applications,” said Ron Bianchini, Avere president and CEO. “These results show that with a scalable, cloud-ready storage architecture, organizations can begin to move data currently stored on premises to services like Amazon S3 in order to take advantage of the enormous cost savings.“

The tested Edge filer configuration consisted of three FXT 3800 nodes backed by S3 and achieved 180,141 ops/sec with an overall response time of 0.86 msec. A similar test run with the same nodes backed by a ZFS-based NAS system achieved 180,043 ops/sec with an overall response time of 0.87 msec. The cloud storage service used in the test included a subscription to Amazon S3 to store data, and a separate subscription to AWS Direct Connect providing private 1Gb/s connectivity from the Avere Edge filer cluster directly to Amazon S3.

Avere FlashCloud
FlashCloud on FXT Series Edge filers integrates public and private object storage with legacy NAS into a global namespace and provides performance for users everywhere via NAS protocols. The filers provide enterprise NAS functionality, including NFS and CIFS protocols, scalable performance, and HA, to support any applications running on NAS. Together, filers and object storage provide capacity scaling and enable 70% or more savings in TCO.

FlashCloud is available to customers in April 2014.