After Coraid’s Disbandment, Founder and CTO Brantley Coile Launches Fourth Start-Up

A year after Coraid’s disbandment, inventor and CEO Brantley Coile presents the first product release of his fourth start-up, SouthSuite, Inc., based in Athens, GA.

Coraid collapsed in 2015, leaving 1,700 customers without support. The former Coraid team approached Coile to see if he would be interested in purchasing the intellectual property for his first product line.

[In May of 2015, The Brantley Coile Company purchased the software and all associated trademarks to the SRX and VSX products. Editor]

SouthSuite’s core•aid brand SR704 is a downloadable software storage appliance that can be installed on new or used Supermicro hardware as well as existing Coraid storage arrays. The software is compatible with the previous Coraid systems, so existing systems can be easily upgraded.

“It’s been fun to get back into the saddle and code this release,” Coile said. “We took the old Coraid code, pulled everything apart, and then reassembled it into a form that’s more apropos to a software product.”

core•aid SR704 continues Coile’s trademark of flexibility by allowing users to create virtual disk targets that can be accessed anywhere on the Ethernet fabric. A petabyte of core•aid SR704 storage can cost as little as $60,000. As with Coile’s other products, he designed the new software to be flexible, fast, and cheap.

This core•aid release supports new 4K physical sector disk drives. The SR704 supports DHCP IP, so users can now TCP into the box. It also streamlines the update process from a series of steps to a single update command that pulls the new release from the web. No more creating LUNs, copying tarc files and so on.

SouthSuite is focused on the values that make storage products popular in the first place: helping Linux and VMware users have as much storage as they want at the lowest price possible.

Coile started Coraid during a time when storage systems were offered as a bundled hardware/software unit. Today, thanks to software-defined systems, people are willing to buy their own Supermicro chassis or motherboards and buy the software separately to save money.

“Why should they pay a premium for off-the-shelf hardware?” Coile asked. “My software appliance helps folks do that at a single low price, instead of complicated pricing based on storage served.”

For those seeking ease of installation, Coile’s new software boasts the ability to create ‘turnkey appliances,’ a simplicity that he believes other software vendors fail to offer.

“The new core•aid release isn’t a rehashed timesharing system,” Coile said. “It installs with no effort. It needs no attention while running. From install to working LUN is only three commands.”

While Coile wears many hats for SouthSuite, he is a hardcore developer at heart, spending 80% of his days actually programming. He and his small staff work from the historic Southern Mutual Building, Athens’ first skyscraper built in 1908 and overlooks the University of Georgia’s campus.

“It’s a great place to invent new stuff,” Coile said.

Coile is eager to release much more ‘new stuff’ that will be compatible with both existing Coraid products and commodity hardware.

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by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2015.08.31 | News