Microsoft to acquire Avere Systems, a leading enterprise file-storage vendor

Microsoft today announced that they are acquiring Avere Systems, a leading provider of high-performance NFS and SMB file-based storage for Linux and Windows clients running in cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. Over the years, Microsoft has made a number of investments to offer flexible, secure and scalable storage solutions for enterprise organizations. This acquisition will further strengthen Microsoft’s position in the enterprise storage space.

Avere uses a combination of file system and caching technologies to support the demanding performance requirements of organizations that run large-scale compute workloads. Their technology offers not only optimized critical on-premises storage resources but also enables enterprises to move mission-critical, high performance application workloads to the cloud. Popular companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks, animation studio Illumination Mac Guff and Moving Picture Company (MPC) are all Avere’s customers already.

“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. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience,” said Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure.

“Avere and Microsoft both recognize that there are many ways for Enterprises to leverage data center resources and the cloud. Our shared vision is to continue our focus on all of Avere’s use cases – in the datacenter, in the cloud and in hybrid cloud storage and cloud bursting environments. Tighter integration with Azure will result in a much more seamless experience for our customers,” wrote Ronald Bianchini Jr., president and CEO of Avere Systems.