Avere, Fujitsu Team Up for New Storage Offering

Storage vendors Avere and Fujitsu are partnering to build a pre-integrated 100-Tbyte data storage system with 100,000 IOPS performance that will sell for $100,000. The new systems, which bundle products from both companies, are aimed at enterprises that want to update and improve high-performance storage systems while getting support for products that are paired from the outset. Customers can call either company for support under a joint support agreement.

The new 100/100/100 bundle brings together Fujitsu's Core filer with UDS NAS controllers and ETERNUS DX80 S2 Disk Storage System along with a two-node Avere FXT 3100 Edge filer cluster. The companies claim the bundle can scale to 2.5 million IOPs and 2PB in storage.

Howard Marks, a storage analyst with DeepStorage.net and a Network Computing contributor, says the key attraction for enterprise users is that the Avere/Fujitsu bundle offers a good combination of parts that's simpler to deploy compared to putting it all together yourself. "This is about availability, integration and an attractive price point," says Marks. "It simplifies it all for users. When something goes wrong, there's only one number to call."

Individually, the components and technologies don't include any major advances, he says, but put together they offer good value for enterprises.

Avere's FXT Edge filers aim is to optimize NAS performance through a variety of techniques, including tiering, clustering and storage virtualization that treats the combined storage of individual NAS devices as a single pool. The Avere two-node FXT 3100 cluster provides 96 Gbytes of RAM with 2 Gbytes NVRAM and 4.8 Tbytes of SAS disk storage, 12 1-GbE ports and four copper10-GbE ports, according to the company. Up to 50 nodes can be clustered for scalability and high availability.

Fujitsu's contributions to the package include dual active/active UDS NAS controllers with high availability failover, Symantec FileStore OS, and four 1-GbE ports. Also featured is Fujitsu's ETERNUS DX80 S2 Disk Storage System with a control enclosure with dual RAID controllers. Options include 10-GbE connectivity and additional storage drives up to a maximum of 2 petabytes of storage.

Marks notes that one interesting detail of this partnership is Avere's size: "Avere is a relatively small startup that's been playing all by themselves to date. If you can convince a company like Fujitsu that your technology is worthwhile, that's it is ready for prime time, that's the notable thing here."

The new Avere-Fujitsu bundles are expected to be available by mid-November.