Brian Paul, Tenaya Capital: Avere Closes $17M Series B Funding Round

August 9, 2010

Investors have contributed an additional $17 million in funding bringing total investment in Avere to $32 million and enabling it to rapidly expand production and distribution of its FXT Series appliances that accelerate the performance and reduce the costs of NAS environments. Led by Tenaya Capital, the Series B funding round also includes original investors Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

Avere, which launched its FXT Series less than a year ago, has enjoyed success among customers, analysts and industry press. In the past few months, Avere has closed major deals with companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks and GX Technology. The company has also been recognized as a “Cool Vendor in Storage Technologies” by analyst firm Gartner Inc., among the SearchStorage.com’s “Products of the Year”, and named a “Product to Watch” by eWEEK magazine.

Brian Paul, Managing Director of Tenaya Capital, joins the Avere Systems Board. According to Mr. Paul, “Avere has proven to be a company that simply cannot be ignored. We have been watching Avere closely since they entered the market and we are very excited about their disruptive technology and the value they bring to customers. I look forward to joining the company’s Board of Directors and helping Avere to continue to deliver superior business results.”

“While we were not actively looking for additional funding in the company, we jumped at the opportunity to bring on a partner like Tenaya Capital,” said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. “We’re very pleased that we can continue to expand our efforts to introduce dynamic tiering to enterprise storage customers.”

The Avere FXT Series contains both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance without compromises on all types of workloads. Reads, writes, and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere’s unique approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliances monitor access frequency patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server. Movement of data occurs in real-time – not in hours or days – and occurs at the file-level or even block-level within a file. All of this is done automatically by the system – there are no complex policies to configure or update.