Coraid Raising $50 Million, Total at $85 Million

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions, has closed a $50 million investment round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners, and affiliates of Silver Lake, as well as new investors including Seagate Technology LLC and Kinetic Ventures.

The company also announced that it has surpassed 1,500 customers in 45 countries, marking Coraid a growing vendor in the enterprise storage industry. With this new round of financing, Coraid will expand global operations and accelerate innovation in storage and cloud orchestration.
 
"In the era of big data, virtualisation and cloud computing, the $30 billion data storage industry is ripe for disruption. Coraid has cracked the code on delivering unmatched price-performance and simplicity, and it has proven this value with more than 1,500 customers," said Jim McLean, partner at Crosslink Capital. "More importantly, Coraid has developed a uniquely elastic and automated storage architecture that can replace multiple tiers of legacy storage. We’re extremely pleased to join the team."
 
Coraid EtherDrive storage arrays harness the power of massively parallel Ethernet and the scale-out CorOS operating system to deliver faster performance than Fibre Channel at about one fifth the cost. EtherDrive storage arrays can be deployed in less than 60 seconds, and present themselves to servers as direct-attached storage. As part of its development strategy Coraid recently announced the acquisition of cloud orchestration software vendor Yunteq, Inc. to enable policy-based automation of storage, networks, and security for public and private clouds.
 
The company is also taking advantage of improvements in flash storage. At VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, Coraid unveiled its EtherFlash solution, which delivers performance of nearly 200,000 IOPS per shelf using standard SSDs, starting at under $10/GB. In contrast to flash-only storage arrays, Coraid’s platform gives enterprise customers flexibility to mix and match SSD, SAS, and SATA drives to meet a variety of workload requirements.
 
"Coraid has pioneered a critical new category of storage – Ethernet SAN – and we are very optimistic about this next phase of expansion for the company," said John Jarve, general partner at Menlo Ventures. "We see a massive pain point in the market as customers struggle to handle data growth with aging storage technologies. Coraid is defining the next generation of scale-out virtualised storage."
 
"Legacy storage architectures are the number one roadblock to virtualisation and cloud computing, and customers should not be held back because of vendors’ investments into specific technologies which are no longer effective. Ethernet SAN is uniquely positioned to break through that roadblock," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid.
 
"Coraid is passionate about helping customers worldwide gain control of data growth, while driving complexity and cost out of their IT operations. Adding $50 million in funding and experienced new investors to our team will help us accelerate this mission," said Audrey MacLean, Coraid’s Chairman.