IBM to Acquire Object Storage Vendor Cleversafe

Yesterday, IBM announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cleversafe. Cleversafe is a manufacturer of object-based storage appliances. Cleversafe positions themselves as a software-based storage solution, but I’ve only ever seen their software available on the hardware appliances they sell.

I’ve been impressed with the ease-of-use and robustness of the Cleversafe platform. I have a few customers using it and they’re very happy with it.

IBM intends to move Cleversafe into their Cloud business unit to assist with on-premises and hybrid cloud solutions. As of this date, no information has been made public on the price of the acquisition.

You can get more details by reading the IBM press release, which is a good read despite their use of “on-premise” instead of the correct “on-premises”…

Avere Announces Cloud NAS Product

Today, at the Amazon AWS re:Invent show, Avere Systems announced new capabilities for their FXT Edge Filer. The new offering, Cloud NAS, offers support for both Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Glacier. Support for other services is coming. In addition to adding optimization for Cloud storage, the new Cloud NAS also adds object storage optimization.

To my knowledge, this is the first product offering that optimizes the performance of Cloud storage. To explain how it works, I’ll need to give a little background on the Avere Systems FXT Series Filers. Continue reading