Avere Systems announced that it will be exhibiting its line of FXT appliances at SIGGRAPH 2011, the 38th annual international convention and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in booth 150 of the Convention & Exhibition Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, August 7-11. Avere will also be co-sponsoring the Studio SysAdmins Birds-of-a-Feather session on August 9th from 1:00 to 3:00pm. Presentations will be given by several members of the StudioSysAdmins community on open infrastructure and support for the entertainment industry.

In use at leading visual effects and digital animation production facilities, including Sony Picture ImageWorks and Whiskytree, Avere's FXT appliances help media and entertainment companies dramatically improve the speed and agility of the businesses by increasing throughput and scalability of key applications and workflows.  The scale-out NAS solution Avere delivers removes content production bottlenecks by accelerating access to the most demanding VFX and animation applications, improves project timelines and keeps pace with newer workloads like 3D rendering.  FXT appliances also enable shared access for remote designers and animators to create a virtual high-performance storage cloud.

"Avere's scale-out NAS appliances have a proven track record for providing real-world improvements in scalability and access in very performance-intense, media-centric environments," said Ron Bianchini, Avere President and CEO. "SIGGRAPH 2011 is an ideal venue for showing off the FXT series ability to solve the most challenging storage problems attendee companies face."

The Avere FXT Series of high-performance, scale-out NAS appliances is the first-ever solution to deliver the benefits of performance tiering and scale-out clustering to any NAS environment. Avere FXT appliances define a new NAS services product offering, providing value-add NAS functionality to both existing and new NAS deployments and both single-vendor and heterogeneous NAS environments.

The SIGGRAPH 2011 conference and exhibition is a five-day interdisciplinary educational experience including a three-day commercial exhibition that attracts expected to draw an estimated 25,000 professionals from around the world. SIGGRAPH is widely recognized as the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. In addition to SIGGRAPH's leading-edge technical program, the conference's installations provide close-up views of the latest in digital art, emerging technologies, and hands-on opportunities for creative collaboration.