Avere poses quandary for storage channel

After six months in the UK, network optimisation vendor Avere Systems has provided an update on its market adoption, benefit and channel strategy. In a candid interview with Channel Pro, Ronald Bianchini, Jr. co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems, believes that the firm has a “game changer” in terms of how the channel will sell storage in the future.

 In the most simplistic description, Avere provides a cache-heavy, intelligent front end between application and any storage infrastructure to improve performance. The firm offers an example using its implementation of a 12Tb / 100,000 IOPS storage solution compared to the NetApp equivalent. According to Avere, the NetApp solution has a list price of around £800,000 compared to its list price of just £250,000 or less than a third of the cost.

This example compares a NetApp fibre channel versus a 10 Gigabit Ethernet Avere solution, so it is clearly not apples vs. apples, but Bianchini stresses that the performance, reliability and scalability is equal for both reads and writes. Better still, Avere claims that its NAS optimisation hardware can scale and unify any number of NAS vendors’ products.

Howver, the firm still has had a relatively small adoption. According to the co-founder, over the last 18 months in the US market, it has installed 300 systems at “dozens of customers” of which 60 percent are direct touch.

Since its UK launch last February with distributor VADition, it has signed up eight partners, of which Ovation is the notable storage centric partner. The firm still has no UK reference customers and adoption has been sluggish within the partner community. The firm puts some of that down to fear from rival vendors. “It’s an interesting relationship between us and the vendors – not the partners,” stresses Bianchini. “If it’s a NetApp shop, they don’t want to tell them about us. If its Isilon trying to get footprint, they may say, spend a third of the cost and put a couple of NL’s with Avere and you will hit your performance and your capacity targets.”

Rebecca Thompson VP of marketing Avere puts it more bluntly: “If I have a good business selling NetApp then NetApp is mad at me [if I add Avere].”  “The channel is worried that they will have retaliation from say a NetApp, who will say – If you’re going to sell Avere kit – you don’t need to sell ours!”

But Bianchini believes that the opportunity will overcome that fear: “Go to the partner that can’t break into that account, he goes in and offers a NetApp 2000 or Isilon NL instead of [a more expensive] NetApp 6000 with PAM (Performance Acceleration Module) cards… with a couple of our nodes, he makes it worthwhile, he’s going to sell it for a third of what the [rival] is selling for.”

In the future, Avere will be targeting partners of other less expensive commodity storage vendors like Nexsan and Scale Computing, which are looking to provide a competitive edge against the bigger storage brands.

More crucially, over the next few months it will be announcing a number of key reference customers, complete with validated data to show the channel the potential it has to offer. “The key right now is wins,” explains Bianchini and the firm believes that as these names become public, the channel will be more willing to add Avere to the mix.

Channel Pro comment:

Avere poses a quandary to the channel. If the claims are to be believed, and the background of the founders and senior management team provide credibility, it offers a compelling solution. However, this is the fundamental point: An Avere/ NetApp channel partner can potentially go into a deal and undercut a rival NetApp partner if they are prepared to take more bottom line profit.

Talking to Barrie Desmond at VADition, it’s clear that the distributor feels that partners might well be a bit “conservative” at the moment in terms of taking on new storage products – but in his view, the rewards will tempt partners to adopt. “Is it better to have 100 percent of something or 100 percent of nothing?” he quips.

 Reference case studies are due to appear later this year and should make interesting reading. The firm confidentially shared some of details of these wins; all are customers with reputable brands and in almost every case they already have an allegiance with an incumbent “big brand” storage vendor.

Bianchini is adamant that he won’t be selling up anytime soon. As the ex co-founder of Spinnaker (bought by NetApp) he feels that this time round, he would like to be in charge of his own destiny. With the scale-out acquisition wars over, is Avere and NAS Optimisation the next big thing? At the moment there is not enough proof in the pudding, but it is coming and the storage channel should watch this space very carefully.