Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Avere Systems, a provider of NFS and SMB file-based storage for Linux and Windows clients running in cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. The purchase was announced in a blog post by Jason Zander, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure.
“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,” said Zander.
Avere is described by Zander as using “an innovative combination of file system and caching technologies to support the performance requirements for customers who run large-scale compute workloads.”
In his blog post, Zander added that “in the media and entertainment industry, Avere has worked with global brands including Sony Pictures Imageworks, animation studio Illumination Mac Guff and Moving Picture Company (MPC) to decrease production time and lower costs in a world where innovation and time to market is more critical than ever.”
Beyond media and entertainment, said Zander, customers in life sciences, education, oil and gas, financial services, manufacturing and other sectors are also increasingly seeking these types of solutions to help transform their businesses.
The Library of Congress, Johns Hopkins University and Teradyne, a developer and supplier of automatic test equipment for the semiconductor industry, are additional examples of organizations that Avere has helped scale data center performance and capacity, and optimize infrastructure placement.