University of Georgia Complex Carbohydrate Research Center Migrates Data to Coraid SAN

CORAID, Inc. announced that the Department of Energy’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia has deployed award-winning CORAID EtherDrive SAN storage appliances to replace the Center’s aging tape backup system for archiving the facility’s research data. A simple interface, low cost per storage unit, and no specialized hardware requirements all factored into the CCRC selection of EtherDrive SAN for data archiving. Through its deployment of EtherDrive, CCRC realized significant savings in storage requirements, overhead, and power consumption.

"CORAID offers the most cost efficient storage solution," said Lachele Foley, Assistant Research Scientist at CCRC. "We chose EtherDrive SAN not only because of the low cost per storage unit of about $0.51 per gigabyte, but the technology’s use of open source and freely available drivers mean that it works optimally with our existing Linux infrastructure. Because EtherDrive uses a standard Ethernet interface, most every computer in our facility can be easily attached to the SAN, making use of our existing technology investments and making the process of migrating our storage very fast."

The University of Georgia Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) was established in 1985 to answer the national need for a center devoted to investigating the chemistry, physiology, and developmental and molecular biology of biologically important complex carbohydrates. Funded by the US Department of Energy, the CCRC is the Center for Plant and Microbial Complex Carbohydrates and the only National Institutes of Health Resource Center for Biomedical Carbohydrates in the nation. As a federal research laboratory, the CCRC handles many terabytes of data in its research of the structures and functions of complex carbohydrates from plants, microbes, and animals. Faced with the storage and management of such vast volumes of data, to meet growing storage needs, the CRCC uses Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure that utilizes CORAID EtherDrive storage.

The CCRC is organized to optimize cooperation and collaboration across multiple disciplines including biomedical, plant, and microbial glycosciences, synthetic and analytical chemistry and is home to four federally funded centers: the DOE Center for Plant and Microbial Complex Carbohydrate, the NIH Integrated Technology Resource for Biomedical Glycomics, the NIH Research Resource for Integrated Glycotechnology, and the Southeast Collaboratory for Biomolecular NMR.

Shipping EtherDrive SAN solutions since 2004 to thousands of customers all over the globe, CORAID storage spans across a broad spectrum of critical storage applications for a broad range of customers in the enterprise, government, research, educational institutions, and web hosting service providers.

The CORAID EtherDrive family of storage products provides affordably fast SAN solutions based on the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) lightweight storage area network protocol. AoE, an elegantly simple protocol, leverages the advantages of Ethernet to transport ATA disk commands without the burden of TCP/IP overhead. EtherDrive SAN solutions deliver affordably fast SAN solutions that are simple to understand and easy to use.