Extending on-premise storage infrastructure to the public cloud can potentially allow CIOs to have the best of both worlds: take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model to scale even the steepest of usage spikes on a budget, while still keep their most sensitive data within the four walls of their organizations. But “can” doesn’t always mean “will”.

There are a number of logistical challenges to effectively delivering cloud resources in an enterprise setting, chief of which is the need to manage and keep track of those resources across all the different business units and locations. That includes meeting security and compliance requirements in off-premise deployments, which is a formidable task in and of itself, as well as addressing the inherent latency overhead of the public cloud.

Avere Systems just raised $20 million in a fourth round of funding to tackle those issues and remove the bottlenecks that currently  prevent enterprises from taking full advantage of the race to zero that had engulfed the major providers. The Pittsburgh company has developed a unique  “Core-Edge” architecture that treats cloud resources as just another storage tier which happens to be remotely managed.

The company’s appliances extend that approach across the entire network-attached storage (NAS) landscape, connecting to legacy in-house hardware and managed services with equal ease though a set of object interfaces that standardize incoming IO. The details of the various components that make up the environment are then tucked away under an abstracted management plan that breaks down the individual silos into a multi-layered pool of capacity where workloads are automatically relegated to the most appropriate level.

Avere says that setup  practically eliminates cloud latency while making it easier for users to scale their environments and providing increased protection against outages. Vendor lock-in also becomes much less of an issue. For customers that want more, the firm offers advanced capabilities on top of that abstraction layer such as seamless data migration among tiers and mirroring.

Capital growth

The new funding brings Avere’s raised capital to $57 million, a notable accomplishment of a six-year-old company. The round was led by new investor Western Digital Capital, the  hard drive giant’s investment arm, and saw the participation of all existing backers. The list consists exclusively of big names: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.

Avere said that it will use the fresh capital to expand sales and marketing efforts and accelerate the development of its offering.  Western Digital buying a ticket on that roadmap makes the financing significant not just for the company itself but also the broader storage industry, which is witnessing a  surge of interest in hybrid cloud solutions from major vendors.

Case in point, EMC bought out TwinStrata earlier this week, a startup that sells appliances which can be hooked up to public cloud deployments for use cases such as data protection that require information to be moved off-premise. Hot on the heels of the deal being announced, Microsoft pulled the curtains back on two new additions to the cloud-integrated storage appliance family it obtained as part of the 2012 acquisition of StorSimple. Not unlike TwinStrata’s offering, the systems connect to Azure and allow users to shuffle files among their on- and off-premise implementations as needed.

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