Microsoft To Acquire Avere Systems, Add High-Performance Appliances, Hybrid Cloud NAS To Azure

Microsoft Wednesday said it has agreed to acquire Avere Systems, a developer of technology that provides fast access to file-based data on hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Pittsburgh-based Avere, founded in 2008, is the developer of the Avere OS, a file system that provides file services to file-based data sitting in on-premises flash storage appliances and in hybrid clouds. The company sells its own series of FXT edge filers, including both all-flash storage versions and spinning disk versions.

The company also provides its filer as a virtual appliance, the Virtual FXT (vFXT) Edge filers, that provide NAS capabilities in the compute cloud. The vFXT is available for cloud bursting, and supports a pay-as-you-go model. The vFXT is currently available for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

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Avere also offers FlashCloud, which runs on FXT Edge filers with object APIs to connect to public and private clouds. They can be clustered to enable cloud-based NAS to scale on-premises with millions of IOPS of performance and 450 TB of capacity, while supporting high-availability access to data in the cloud. FlashCloud works with both physical and virtual FXT Edge filers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jason Zander, corporate vice president for Microsoft Azure, wrote in a Wednesday blog post that Avere combines file system and caching technologies to support the performance requirements of large-scale compute workloads in such markets as the media and entertainment industry, life sciences, education, oil and gas, financial services and manufacturing.

"By bringing together Avere’s storage expertise with the power of Microsoft’s cloud, customers will benefit from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience," Zander wrote.

Avere President and CEO Ron Bianchini on Wednesday wrote in a separate blog post that Avere Systems will joining Microsoft to help enable demanding enterprise workloads to run in the data center, the cloud, and hybrid cloud environments.

"Over the years, Microsoft has made significant investments to provide its customers with the most flexible, secure and scalable storage solutions in the marketplace and has made Azure the natural home for enterprise applications. This shared focus on large Enterprise applications makes Microsoft a great fit for Avere," Bianchini wrote.