FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS


Cost Savings

You can achieve a 5-to-1 reduction in disks, power, and space because Avere separates performance scaling from capacity scaling and more efficiently delivers both.  Avere OS moves your application’s active data to FXT appliances and as a result minimizes the data access requirements on your mass storage system.  Because your mass storage system is lightly loaded, it can be optimized for cost, power, and space by using low-power and high-density SATA disks.  


By contrast, the performance of traditional NAS is limited by the quantity and performance of the attached disks. For even modest application performance requirements, traditional NAS uses large numbers of high-performance FC or SAS disks.  This results in costly over-provisioning of storage capacity, inefficient use of limited data center space, and wasted power consumption. 


Our posting of SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 performance results provides a good example of the disk, power, and space saving that can be achieved with Avere. On the SPECsfs2008 website you will find six vendors who achieved greater than 100,000 ops/sec throughput: Avere, BlueArc, Exanet, HP, Huawei Symantec, and NetApp. A comparison of these results and the number of disks required shows that Avere used dramatically fewer disks. BlueArc used 292 disks to achieve 146,076 ops/sec with 3.34 ms ORT. Exanet used 592 disks to achieve 119,550 ops/sec with 2.07ms ORT (overall response time). HP used 584 disks to achieve 134,689 ops/sec and 2.53 ms ORT. Huawei Symantec used 960 disks to achieve 176,728 ops/sec with 1.67ms ORT. NetApp used 324 disks to achieve 120,011 ops/sec with 1.95ms ORT. By contrast, Avere used only 79 drives to achieve 131,591 ops/sec with 1.38ms ORT. Doing a little math, Avere achieves 3.3, 8.2, 7.2, 9.0, and 4.5 times more ops/sec per disk used than the other vendors.


Power and space savings with Avere are even more dramatic than the disk savings. A closer look at the results shows that BlueArc, Exanet, HP, Huawei Symantec, and NetApp use only high-power and low-capacity 15k FC/SAS disks for storing data. Avere on the other hand uses a more efficient, hybrid approach. The mass storage system is optimized for capacity and uses only low-power and high-capacity SATA disks. FXT appliances, which are optimized for performance, are the only place where 15k SAS disks are used.


For more discussion on SPECsfs2008 performance, see the Avere blog posting NFS Benchmark’s Biggest Loser.


For an estimate on the disk, power, and space reduction you can achieve with Avere, please consult the Avere savings calculator.  



SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECsfs®2008 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Oct 12, 2009. Above we compare all SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results that achieved greater than 100k ops/sec throughput.  For the comparison we calculate ops/sec per disk by dividing the reported ops/sec throughput by the total number of disks used in the system under test.  For the latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs2008. 




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Performance

There are two dimensions to consider when evaluating performance.  First, there’s the application workload.  Avere solutions provide high performance across a wide range of workloads by accelerating read, write, and metadata operations.  In addition, these operations are accelerated across the full range of access patterns, including random access to small files, sequential access to large files, and a mix of both. 


The second dimension is the amount of performance (in ops/sec) or throughput (in MB/sec) required for a given workload.  The Avere FXT Series meet the needs of most applications because they provide high performance on a single appliance and linearly scale performance as appliances are added to a cluster.  In small file, random access tests, FXT clusters can achieve millions of ops/sec.  In large file, sequential tests, FXT clusters can achieve tens of gigabytes/sec of throughput.  


Our posting of SPECsfs2008 results provides a good example of how the FXT Series provides high performance, low latency, and linear performance scaling through clustering. SPECsfs2008 is an excellent benchmark for testing the throughput and latency of read, write, and metadata operations on an NFS file server. SPECsfs2008 emulates a typical, large-scale file server environment and executes a mix of operations are follows: 18% read data, 10% write data, 25% read directory, 2% write directory, 41% read metadata, 4% write metadata. When comparing all SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results in the neighborhood of 20,000 ops/sec, the Avere FXT 2500 (1 Node) results, 22,025 ops/sec with 1.30ms overall response time (ORT), provide the lowest latency and uses the fewest disks, a clear indication that Avere excels at read, write, and metadata performance. The Avere FXT 2500 (6 Node Cluster) results, 131,591 ops/sec with 1.38ms ORT, demonstrate the linear performance scaling achieved when clustering FXT appliance nodes. When comparing Avere's 6 node results to the 1 node results on a per node basis, each of the 6 nodes provides 99.7% of the throughput with only a 6% increase in latency. For more discussion on SPECsfs2008 performance, see the Avere blog posting NFS Benchmark’s Biggest Loser.


The best way to size an Avere system for your performance requirements is to work with an Avere systems engineer.  To contact an Avere systems engineer, please submit a request.   



SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECsfs®2008 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Oct 12, 2009. For the latest SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/sfs2008.




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Products

The FXT 2700 was designed to accelerate performance in two types of NAS environments. The first type is where high-performance (10k or 15k) FC or SAS disks are in use and not keeping up with the performance demand. The FXT 2700 complements these environments by adding even higher-performance solid-state storage tiers including 64GB of DRAM and 512GB of Flash SSD per appliance. Adding an FXT 2700 cluster as a consolidated SSD tier to your NAS environment is less expensive, less disruptive, and more scalable than adding Flash storage directly into each of your NAS filers. Up to 25 FXT 2700 appliances can be clustered, providing up to 1.6TB of DRAM and 13TB of SSD.


The second type is where the primary application workload is random IO and a large amount of data is being accessed. Each FXT 2700 appliance can support up to 0.5TB of randomly accessed data and is the best performance/$ solution for such environments. Mass storage systems with SATA disks can be used in this case provided the FXT 2700 cluster is sized to store the entire working set so that accesses to the mass storage system are limited.


The FXT 2300 and FXT 2500 are the best performance/$ choices for most other applications. This includes NAS environments using lower-performance SATA disks and where the application workload is a mix of large sequential IO and random IO.


Selection between 2300 and 2500 models is dependent on the size of your application’s working set; performance requirements do not affect the selection since both models provide the same performance. The FXT 2300 supports a working set of 1.2TB raw per appliance, scaling by 1.2TB increments to a maximum working set size of 29TB raw in a cluster with 25 appliances. The FXT 2500 supports a working set that is three times greater. That is, the FXT 2500 supports a working set of 3.6TB raw per appliance, scaling by 3.6TB increments to a maximum working set size of 90TB raw in a cluster with 25 appliances.


The best way to select an FXT model for your requirements is to work with an Avere systems engineer. To contact an Avere systems engineer, please submit a request.





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Technology

Demand-Driven Storage refers to the ability to dynamically organize and deliver data in response to business demand. There are several elements of the Avere architecture that enable it: 


  1. Separation of traditional NAS file server function into two parts - data delivery and data retention or archiving. Avere's handling of the data delivery function allows application demands to be met by an architecture designed specifically for performance and scalability. Capacity needs are met by a traditional NAS filer or mass storage system fulfilling the data retention function.
  2. Dynamic tiering is used within the Avere system, ensuring that data is automatically moved to the optimal storage media based upon demand patterns and data characteristics. As data becomes inactive, Avere moves it to slower media, such as SATA drives that reside in the mass storage system.
  3. The ability to easily cluster Avere appliances to scale performance. Each node added into the cluster increases the amount of working set that can be held without any overhead.



Each Avere FXT appliance has multiple storage media within it. As clients read or write data, algorithms look at how frequently the data is accessed, the characteristics of the data and how it is accessed (i.e. random or sequential.) Blocks of data are then placed on the most optimal tier within the FXT for delivery to clients or sent to the mass storage system in the case of infrequent access requests. As demand patterns change, data is moved in real-time from one tier to another.




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