3/ outpace.IO

Following the death of Coraid, Inc. early this year, several guys from Alyseo SARL created in February 2015 outpace.IO, a start-up based in Winder, GA with a technical and operational business in Montreuil, France, where is based Coraid’s distributor Alyseo.

It is promoting SAN based on ATA over Ethernet (AoE) with new software, industry standard commodity hardware and Ethernet.

Founders:

CEO and co-founder Yacine Kheddache also currently at Alyseo, a company he co—founded and being its CTO. He was previously at Orange France, Chello Broadband France (UPC group) and Nortel Networks.

Sebastien Scuiereb in charge of revenue is owner and VP sales and marketing at Alyseo.

Francois Billard in charge of software, is also owner and R&D director at Alyseo.

Technology
AoE is a way to move storage out of servers and onto an Ethernet storage network. Disk read/write requests are placed directly into Ethernet frames/packets.

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Ethernet SAN technology based on AoE is a connectionless protocol that connects servers and storage directly across Layer 2 Ethernet. It does not require TCP/IP like iSCSI or networks like FC. It also does not require user configured multi-path IO software. Ethernet SAN packets are automatically sent over every available network path between the server and storage.

Products

outpace.IO has developed a range of storage appliances that deliver an Ethernet SAN architecture:

• A series: a Linux-based AoE implementation that delivers performance, simplicity and reliability into an Ethernet disk array.
• F series: a FPGA AoE implementation that delivers performance in embedded and space constrained environments, suited for the aircraft industry.
• Z series: an appliance that combines OpenZFS file storage with scale-out and massively parallel Ethernet SAN technology, being implemented on top of the AoE backend for an unified storage solution.

The company claimed 150 customers from business sectors including manufacturing, life sciences, software services, healthcare, education, financial services, government agencies, military organizations, and hosting companies.
 
Current Coraid customers are supported by Brantley Coile, a pioneer of AoE who was founder, chief scientist, CRO and board’s director of Coraid. On the web site of The Brantley Coile Companyhttp://etherdrive.com/, you can read that: “over $100,000,000 worth of systems over the past ten years” have been sold.

Final question is: will the new outpace.IO be able to do better than Coraid, a Redwood City, CA company born in 2000 that burns $114.3 million of financial funding before dying?