Welcome to our 13th podcast where we talk edge filers with Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. Avere has been around the industry for quite awhile now and has always provided superior performance acceleration for backend NAS filers. But with their latest version, they now offer that same sort of performance acceleration for public cloud and object storage systems as well.
Ron has had quite a long history in the IT world. He was the CEO of Spinnaker Networks prior to NetApp’s acquisition which was used as the progenitor for FAS Cluster Mode services. He also worked for another startup and was a university professor before that. The second former professor on our podcast.
Avere Systems started out as an attempt to take NAS in another direction, this time performance at the edge with capacity filers at the core. That promise is now being taken to object store and public cloud storage as well.
This months episode comes in at a little more than 44 minutes. 
We start our discussion with a short history of Avere Systems. It was originally targeted to offer an edge-core NAS solution where the Avere appliance supplied performance optimization and the NAS backend storage offered capacity optimization.
You may recall that originally there were a lot of edge-core NAS solutions on the market at one time but Avere has outlasted them all. One secret to Avere’s success was that they construct a virtualization layer with their own file system on top of backend NAS storage. This allowed them to offer unique capabilities such as Global name space, non-disruptive migration and disaster recovery but it also ultimately made it much easier for them to offer the same functionality for object storage and public cloud services.
Ron can talk NAS performance with the best of them and he shows us how Avere performs so well, even with relatively slow object and public cloud storage behind them. The Greybeards were duly impressed with Avere’s last quarter SPECsfs submissions (see Ray’s June SPECsfs2008 dispatch for more) with object storage (Cleversafe & Amplidata) and public cloud (Amazon’s Flash Storage) backends. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Ron Bianchini, Jr. President & CEO Avere Systems
As president and chief executive officer of Avere Systems, co-founder Ron Bianchini has a long record of accomplishment in building and leading successful companies that deliver breakthrough technologies. Prior to Avere, Ron was a senior vice president at NetApp, where he served as the leader of the NetApp Pittsburgh Technology Center. Before NetApp, he was CEO and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, which developed the Storage Grid architecture acquired by NetApp. Ron also served as vice president of product architecture of FORE Systems, where he was responsible for ATM products. Previously, he co-founded Scalable Networks [acquired by FORE], which designed and implemented a large-scale Gigabit Ethernet switch, and earlier in his career, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ron received an S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds numerous patents in fault-tolerant distributed systems and high-speed network design and has published extensively in technical journals.
