FXT Series Edge filers improves ‘bursty’ VM traffic flow at Concert Pharmaceuticals

PITTSBURGH, August 20, 2012 – Avere Systems today announced that Concert Pharmaceuticals Inc., a clinical stage biotechnology company, has implemented its FXT Series Edge filers into its existing storage infrastructure. The Avere Edge filers were chosen to reduce latency and improve performance of applications critical in Concert’s  mission.

Lexington, Mass.-based Concert is dedicated to creating new medicines through its proprietary DCE Platform™ that utilizes the naturally occurring element deuterium – a safe and stable form of the element hydrogen. Concert uses deuterium to improve upon the metabolic properties of a drug while making little or no change to its intrinsic effectiveness.  Concert has executed on this approach with its lead program, CTP-499, in Phase 2 clinical testing for chronic kidney disease.

Concert operates in a nearly 100 percent virtualized environment, including Exchange and application servers, with a Core filer from NetApp. With the NetApp filer nearing its end of life and issues of unpredictable traffic spikes, Concert began looking at new storage options that would minimize disruption to its production environment and allow it to keep its existing filer. The organization decided to implement a pair of Avere FXT Series Edge filers to optimize its environment and run all of its VMware traffic through.

“Basically, what drove me to Avere was a ‘bursty’ pattern of storage use that required me to schedule and plan the clock cycles throughout the day,” said K. Mitch Goldenberg, associate director of IT/IS at Concert Pharmaceuticals. “I put Avere in front of everything to flatten out the spikes. And it works beautifully. It absorbs the ‘burstiness’ and gives low latency, predictable ops per second to my Core filer.  So, now I can go and speed up what I was already doing.”

Avere recently introduced its innovative Edge-Core architecture for NAS that ensures enterprise IT is best positioned to leverage the performance benefits of Flash, the consolidation benefits of virtualization and the collaborative and economic benefits of the cloud. The new architecture for NAS puts the fastest media and the intelligence to manage it closest to the user, boosting performance and removing storage bottlenecks created by legacy NAS architectures. 

“For a company like Concert Pharmaceuticals that wants to simultaneously leverage its existing infrastructure and solve a storage performance problem, Avere is a perfect fit,” said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. “Avere FXT Series Edge filers are an ideal storage solution for virtualized environments because of their ability to provide the simplicity and familiarity of NAS with the ability to handle the write-centric workloads that virtualization generates.”