Avere Systems

Avere Systems was a Pittsburgh-based enterprise storage company founded in 2008 that pioneered high-performance NAS caching and hybrid cloud storage solutions for media, entertainment, and HPC workloads. Its flagship vFXT product acted as a high-speed cache layer between compute clusters and back-end NAS or cloud storage, enabling low-latency access to large datasets without migrating data. Avere's technology was particularly valued for rendering pipelines, genomics, seismic processing, and other I/O-intensive workflows. The company raised $97 million in venture funding before being acquired by Microsoft in January 2018, with its technology subsequently integrated into Azure as Azure HPC Cache.