Coraid EtherFlash Scale-Out Solution With SSDs, SAS, and SATA Drives

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, unveiled the EtherFlash solution, which provides performance, low-latency access to flash drives without the bottlenecks and limitations of legacy storage and FC networks.

Starting at less than $10 per Gigabyte, and scaling from two drives to multiple petabytes using EtherDrive storage arrays, EtherFlash accelerates application and virtualization performance with flash storage and a configurable, scale-out architecture.
 
"As solid state becomes more accepted and adopted in the storage world, EtherFlash should be viewed as more than just a ‘me-too’ SSD introduction," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Coraid transparently mixes SSDs, SATA and SAS drives into a ‘scale-out, single-storage-pool’ architecture with impressive price-performance. More importantly, Coraid uniquely delivers a single storage tier that can handle nearly any enterprise requirement, including server virtualization, VDI, tier one databases, archive, and video."
 
The EtherFlash solution, comprised of a EtherDrive storage array with commodity SSD drives and new CorOS 6.0 software, delivers nearly 200,000 IOPS in a single chassis and under 200 microsecond latency. Coraid’s platform uses parallel 10GbE and the CorOS scale-out operating system to deliver faster performance than high-end FC arrays, at a fraction of the cost. Coraid’s one-tier-for-all architecture reduces the complexity and operational expense associated with enterprise storage, and enables IT departments to build a virtualized pool of storage resources that can be rapidly configured and assigned to end users.
 
Customers can deploy a mix of SSD, SAS, and SATA drives in a single array based on their evolving requirements, and add appliances to expand capacity and performance. For example, a high-end Web application could leverage 24 or 36 SSDs in a single array, while a VDI environment might combine 6 SSDs for shared boot images with 30 SATA drives for high-capacity file storage. In addition, Coraid Zero Hour Support enables drives to be swapped between storage arrays in case of planned maintenance or hardware failure.
 
Each EtherDrive storage array can be configured in under 60 seconds, and is presented to servers as a direct-attached SCSI drive. In VMware environments, this enables self-service configuration from the hypervisor as soon as a new storage array comes online.
 
Flash storage has emerged as a major disruptor in the storage industry, particularly in application areas- such as Web 2.0 applications and virtualization-that require fast random IOPS access to data. Unfortunately, customers face a confusing array of specialized flash products that add yet more complexity to their storage architectures. Server-based flash limits data sharing while custom flash arrays are tethered to expensive legacy networks and introduce another tier of storage to manage. In contrast, EtherFlash upgrades flash storage from a point solution to a core building block of the enterprise architecture.
 
"Coraid EtherFlash delivers exactly what customers need: flash performance, scale-out architecture, commodity economics, and simplified management, without requiring yet another tier of custom storage arrays," said Carl Wright, executive vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Coraid. "Many customers initially select Coraid because of our industry-leading price-performance across all drive types, including flash. However, our greatest value comes from simplifying the storage network and giving customers the flexibility to scale performance and capacity as needed, without forklift upgrades and complex SAN reconfiguration."
 
Coraid EtherFlash and CorOS 6.0 will be available in September starting at under $30,000 per chassis.