GigaOM » coraid

Coraid delivers its flexible cloud storage vision

Barb Darrow — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:00:12 +0000

The race is on to make every part of the data center — from switches to storage arrays — software configurable. That’s the rationale behind Coraid’s new EtherCloud storage platform.

For EtherCloud, Coraid is using Yunteq orchestration technology acquired last October to make its storage more flexible and adaptable to changing needs.

Redwood City, CA.-based Coraid’s storage takes advantage of the lower-level — and very efficient — ATA-over-Ethernet protocol. That means that Coraid customers don’t need to upgrade to the pricey switches and other gear required by the fancier iSCSI or Fibre Channel protocols and still get good performance, said Jim Bagley, senior analyst with Storage Strategies Now.

Coraid CEO Kevin Brown said the resulting software will let users build and manage pools of shared storage that can then be divvied up or consolidated as needed. EtherCloud taps into customers’ existing LDAP or AD directories for authentication and will meter the use of compute, network and storage resources. The company said admins will be able to deploy VMware ESXi VMs — and their associated storage allocation and network connections — in one click.

The company also announced programmable EtherFlash Cache that uses solid-state drives (SSDs) to boost read performance in time-sensitive server virtualization, database and e-mail applications. That software will let customers “mix and match” drives as needed, Brown said. The use of solid-state or flash drives is another recurring theme this week as vendors prep for the Flash Summit Conference.

Coraid, which landed $50 million in Series C funding in November, is something of an up-and-comer in the a market where it faces much bigger competitors in EMC and NetApp.

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Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:44:59 +0000

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Coraid raises $50 million for cheap scale-out storage push

Barb Darrow — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:00:01 +0000

Scale-out SAN vendor Coraid raised $50 million in venture funding in a Series C round led by Crosslink Capital. Seagate, Kinetic Ventures, and Silverlake AG are also new backers in this round. The seven-year-old company has now garnered a total of $85 million. Early investors were Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners.

Coraid is banking that the commoditization craze that gutted server prices before spilling into networking gear, is now affecting storage. The company’s stance is that its reliance on cheap, off-the-shelf hardware running its software on simple Ethernet networks make it a cost-effective option. Coraid relies on the ATA-over-Ethernet, or AoE, protocol, rather than the iSCSI protocol popularized by storage rivals such as EqualLogic, now owned by Dell and LeftHand Networks, which is now part of Hewlett-Packard.

“The networking and storage layers were still running on the mainframe model. In the last year, the networking economics flipped. One layer is left — storage. It’s a $30 billion industry and the EMCs and IBMs of the world from the storage 1.0 era, added some software and vitamins, but for the most part are unchanged,” said Coraid CEO Kevin Brown, a former NetApp executive.

As more businesses virtualize their workloads and move to cloud computing, they need to be more flexible with their storage as well. “Once you’re virtualized, you need to get your disk drives out of your servers,” Brown said.

Such flexibility is key to Coraid’s pitch, and last month, the company bought Yunteq, a maker of orchestration software for public and private clouds, to bolster its options in cloud infrastructure. Terms were not disclosed. ”Modern data centers are moving to automated cloud architectures, but legacy storage lacks the flexibility and scalability to get there,” Brown said in a statement at the time.

Coraid, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., now claims 1,500 customers ranging from small and mid-sized companies to universities and large government agencies including the U.S. Department of Defense.

Upstart storage companies pushing cheap hardware while charging for their own special-sauce software pretty much set the agenda now. Legacy storage giants can no longer afford to ignore this trend. In the past, these companies — much like IBM in its mainframe heyday — hesitated to offer low-cost solutions for fear of cannibalizing sales of their flagship products. But it’s increasingly clear: If they don’t cannibalize themselves, the cheap-hardware guys will do it for them.

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Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.