Last week RisingTide Systems, a stealth startup with no web site, spoke to StorageMojo. This week Avere Systems, a quiet but not stealthy startup with a website wouldn’t. Rebecca Thompson, Avere’s marketing veep, wrote

Hi, Robin. Thanks for the interest, but we’re not ready to talk just yet.

But they will talk at Storage Networking World.

What they do
The title of their SNW talk SSD or HDD? How to Get the Benefits of Both with Dynamic Tiering offers some clues.

At the web site they have a picture of what might be a 2-3u rackmount box. So they aren’t a strict software play, although “tin-wrapped” software is something many customers find appealing.

They are also showing at SC09, the supercomputing show. That suggests a focus on bandwidth rather than IOPS as well as the less lucrative research markets.

Or maybe CMU PhD and Avere founder Ron Bianchini wants to hang out with some scientists. Can’t blame him.

Here’s Ron’s bio from SNW:

Ronald P Bianchini, PhD, Chief Executive Officer, Avere Systems
Ron Bianchini is CEO of Avere Systems, Inc. Prior to co-founding Avere Systems, Bianchini was an SVP of NetApp, where he served as the leader of the NetApp Pittsburgh Technology Center. Prior to NetApp, Bianchini was CEO and co-founder of Spinnaker Networks, which developed the Storage Grid architecture acquired by Network Appliance. He also served as VP of Product Architecture at FORE Systems, where he was responsible for ATM products. In addition, Bianchini founded Scalable Networks, which designed a large-scale Gigabit Ethernet switch, and before that was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Bianchini received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds numerous patents in fault-tolerant distributed systems and high-speed network design.

The StorageMojo take
Ron is a smart guy and it will be interesting to see what new wrinkles he’s got on integrating fast/expensive with slow/cheap. “Dynamic tiering” is not unlike virtual memory.

This seems to be well-trod ground. I’m hoping for a “wow” idea.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.