Avere Closes $17 Million Series B Funding Round

Storage specialist Avere, maker of the FXT Series solid-state storage and traditional spinning media appliances, brings in $17 million in funding.

Avere Systems, a company specializing in Demand-Driven Storage solutions, announced that investors have contributed an additional $17 million in funding bringing total investment in the company to $32 million and enabling it to expand production and distribution of its FXT Series appliances that accelerate the performance of network attached storage environments. Led by Tenaya Capital, the Series B funding round also includes original investors Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

The Avere FXT Series contains both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media. Reads, writes, and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere's approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliances monitor access frequency patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to help increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server.

Each FXT Series hardware platform contains DRAM and NVRAM to accelerate the performance of active data. The most active data is stored in the 64GB bank of DRAM within each FXT appliance. Write performance is accelerated and protected by 1GB of NVRAM provided per appliance. Each appliance also contains 8 15k SAS HDDs or 8 SLC Flash SSDs to support large application working sets. The FXT Series is offered in three models, FXT 2300, FXT 2500, and FXT 2700, each available with 2 10GbE and 2 1GbE or 10 1GbE networking ports.

Movement of data occurs in real-time, and occurs at the file-level or block-level within a file. All of it is done automatically by the system. In the past few months, Avere has closed deals with companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks and GX Technology. In July, the company joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.

Brian Paul, managing director of Tenaya Capital, is joining the Avere Systems board. "Avere has proven to be a company that simply cannot be ignored. We have been watching Avere closely since they entered the market and we are very excited about their disruptive technology and the value they bring to customers," Paul said. "I look forward to joining the company's Board of Directors and helping Avere to continue to deliver superior business results."

Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere, said while the company was not actively looking for additional funding in the company, they jumped at the opportunity to bring on a partner like Tenaya Capital. "We're very pleased that we can continue to expand our efforts to introduce dynamic tiering to enterprise storage customers," he said.