Avere Systems
The Force Multiplier for Genomic Sequencing Analysis

In the current epoch of personalized and precision medicine, clinicians worldwide increasingly require patients’ genetic and other molecular information for real-time prevention, diagnosis and treatment. To efficiently use this patient data, innovative organizations are augmenting on-premises data center infrastructure with cloud resources, realizing scalable access to data without sacrificing performance. Known as “hybrid cloud,” these architectures address the need for continuously expanding compute and storage requirements. Avere Systems offers a set of technologies that allow for such hybrid cloud solutions.

Avere Systems helps organizations enable discovery and treatments with their high-performance storage access and the flexibility to store data with their FXT Series, the first scale-out NAS solution purpose-built for the cloud. The FXT Series is an extremely scalable network-attached storage (NAS) appliance designed to meet the needs of enterprise architectures and high-performance environments. “We focus on the continued development of file system and caching technologies that speed access to compute and storage in hybrid environments,” says Scott Jeschonek, Director of Cloud Products at Avere Systems.

To process more data in less time, Avere FXT Edge filers keep the most in-demand data currently required by researchers on the fastest, most accessible storage while allowing organizations to take advantage of efficient, low-cost object storage and cloud. Dynamic tiering ensures that active data is stored on the high-performance storage media (DRAM, SSD, and SAS) contained within the FXT Edge Filer and read, write, and metadata operations are handled with the lowest latency possible.

We perform activity with the ongoing development of file system and caching technologies that speed access to compute and storage in hybrid environments

Both physical and virtual FXT (vFXT) filers are designed to deliver high performance for big data applications, hide the latency to remote NAS or object-based storage, and provide complete flexibility for enterprises to adopt cloud infrastructures. Using Avere vFXTs, life sciences researchers can easily run large-scale pipelines in their cloud of choice without moving large data sets from their current location in their local NAS. These services can be turned on and off as needed, creating an efficient process to offset peak demand periods without large capital expenditures or time-consuming, disruptive data moves.

For example, when H3 Biomedicine, a pharmaceutical company that integrates human cancer genomics with next-generation synthetic organic chemistry, faced challenges with computing power and demanding high-data growth, they initiated an evaluation of cloud services to augment on-premises 80-core compute servers backed by EMC Isilon storage. With latency appearing insurmountable, they approached Avere Systems. Employing vFXT Edge filer reduced latency in the cloud by more than 15X, enabling scientific applications to run at maximum performance. With Avere, H3 bioinformaticians can now take full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources to analyze more genomic data and rapidly explore multiple scientific approaches, at the same time gaining administrative, financial, and other benefits.

With Avere, customers making the move to the cloud now have a familiar NAS interface that requires no changes to their existing applications, as well as an architecture that scales in both performance and capacity. For the future, the company remains focused on innovating for ways to run a service capable of providing fast and deep caching storage capabilities that can handle petabytes of data.