1-2-1 KEVIN BROWN
The Third Way
Ethernet seems to be the way forward for storage. However, while most attention is focused on iSCSI- and Fibre Channel-based solutions, Coraid offers a viable third alternative, Ethernet SAN systems using ATA over Ethernet. SNS Europe talks to Kevin Brown, Coraid CEO and Gurdip Kalley, Head of Business Development at S3.
Q Please provide some background on the company – when formed and with what objectives?
AKB: Coraid is a leading developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions with more than 1,300 customers
worldwide in sectors including manufacturing, life sciences, software, healthcare, education, financial services, government, and cloud hosting.
The company was founded by Brantley Coile, the inventor of the Cisco PIX Firewall and LocalDirector, and started selling its EtherDrive® storage arrays into the Linux market in 2004. EtherDrive provides the fundamental building blocks for scale-out storage projects supporting virtualization, video, cloud hosting, and high-performance computing. EtherDrive storage provides a fast and simple alternative to legacy iSCSI, Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technologies, which all evolved from mainframe-era designs.
Q And what USPs does Coraid bring to the current storage networking landscape?
AKB: Coraid EtherDrive delivers faster performance than Fibre Channel at one-fifth the cost, while radically
simplifying the storage architecture for modern virtual data centers. Coraid arrays can be configured and deployed in less than sixty seconds, and run on standard Layer 2 Ethernet, eliminating the need for legacy protocols and equipment. EtherDrive high performance SAN arrays deliver up to 1800 MB/sec of throughput, with prices starting at less than $500/TB.
Q End users are becoming familiar with FC and iSCSI-based Ethernet storage – do we need another Ethernet storage protocol right now?
AKB: Data centers are going through massive changes at the compute layer. Remember when we ran big iron servers
from DEC, SGI and Sun Microsystems to handle any serious enterprise application? Those monolithic machines have been replaced with scale-out x86 server architectures, and virtualization ties it all together. We’ve achieved amazing improvements in price-performance and agility at the compute layer, but storage networks and arrays are still stuck in the mainframe era.
Fibre Channel was originally used to carry mainframe storage protocols like FICON and ESCON, and legacy storage arrays were built up around this design. That was OK when you had a couple of database apps and an 8-port SAN, but now you’ve got dozens of VMs on each server and an 800-port SAN, and it takes days or weeks to reconfigure the storage environment. The economic impact of these legacy storage technologies is dramatic – in many environments, storage costs have soared to over 40% of the IT budget, and data growth is only accelerating.
Ethernet SAN, based on commodity Layer 2 Ethernet, is the first new storage technology that can address the explosion of virtualized computing. We’re walking into CIO offices, and showing them how they can double their capacity, improve performance, reduce OPEX, migrate to Ethernet, and at the same time save 20% of their IT
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM FEBRUARY | 2011 15
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