Chris Archinaco, Product Marketing Manager at Avere, Avere Systems, discussed the company’s move from traditional storage to a cloud solution theCube hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, live at the Amazon AWS 2013 Summit. Avere is an established network-attached storage (NAS) provider and is now demonstrating its cloud storage prototype.

“We really think that [ours] is the only architecture that can deliver high performance,” Archinaco said, explaining the move. The prototype was developed after determining what problems the customers wanted to solve in the cloud, and delivering solutions for them.

Asked about the value of Avere in AWS, Chris Archinaco explained that the issue with the power provided by S3 is that it is so simple as a storage solution but it it object based one, and not all businesses can work in an object storage space. “We’ve overlayed a file system into S3,” he said, which allows people to have a seamless transition from NAS to object based storage. Avere helps customers achieve their idea of doing high performance storage but have no disk on site. This means a lot of savings, he added, as there is no need for the cost of energy needed to run the storage infrastructure, and the personnel needed to operate it can be re-allotted to other projects.

Talking about the economics involved in their new prototype, Chris Archinaco explained that their customers usually have massive data that needs to be kept, but actually work with small sets of data. The new solution helps create and edge layer that allows them to keep the data they need and store the rest through S3. All the headaches caused by the need to maintain all that data are effectively dealt with.

Prototype details : AWS virtualization

Asked to detail their current prototype, Archinaco explained it currently is an on-premises  solution, but they are currently working with AWS on virtualization.

Wikibon’s Dave Vellante raised an interesting issue – that of the cloud being quite disruptive for traditional storage. Chris Archinaco agreed that it was totally disruptive. “But it’s a lot less disruptive for our architecture than for other providers,” he added.

The cloud prototype, he explained, was the most customer driven Avere had developed. “It’s really all about customers wanting this solution. When you have so many customers asking you for a solution,” it is like the right direction to go. “Virtually any customers I speak to wants to talk to me about the cloud,” once they find out Avere is doing something there, he added.

The prototype that’s currently in the demo phase will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013. “We plan to stay engaged with Amazon from hereon out,” Chris Archinaco said.

See Archinaco’s entire segment below: