Avere arouses interest

Company claims to reduce customers' cost, space and power consumption

Developments of the week in storage

One of the coolest company's on the planet is coming out of stealth mode this week. Avere Systems, who is making a product that I can't talk about yet (something about cutting off my pinkie finger if I did), is announcing both the launch of their company and the receipt of $15 million in funding from two of the top venture capital companies: Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Nine data storage companies to watch

Avere Systems is providing a storage system that uses multiple types of storage media and will according to the company's claims reduce customers' cost, space and power consumption. Its products are focused on network-attached storage and the ability to scale performance independent of capacity. Avere terms its products 'Demand Driven Storage.'

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One of the coolest company's on the planet is coming out of stealth mode this week. Avere Systems, who is making a product that I can't talk about yet (something about cutting off my pinkie finger if I did), is announcing both the launch of their company and the receipt of $15 million in funding from two of the top venture capital companies: Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Nine data storage companies to watch

Avere Systems is providing a storage system that uses multiple types of storage media and will according to the company's claims reduce customers' cost, space and power consumption. Its products are focused on network-attached storage and the ability to scale performance independent of capacity. Avere terms its products 'Demand Driven Storage.'

Information about the company on Google shines a little light on Avere. The company will be presenting a session at Storage Networking World in October called SSD or HDD? How to Get the Benefits of Both with Dynamic Tiering.The company also is a member of the SPEC.ORG performance council.

And, this too from Google: Chris Mellor of the Register wrote that he thinks Avere is making a "system which attempts to combine the performance of solid state drives with the low cost of hard disk drives, in an architecture that dynamically tiers data onto the most appropriate media" – and I'll neither confirm nor deny that rumor. Just suffice to say, watch out for Avere Systems this fall.

The founders of Avere come from Spinnaker Networks, which was sold to NetApp in 2004. Ron Bianchini is CEO of the fledgling company; Michael Kazar is CTO and Daniel Nydick is vice president of Engineering.

Avere will be previewing its products in the fall of 2009. The company was founded in 2008 and is located in Pittsburgh.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.