High-density drives for Cloud builders

Given the insatiable growth of storage demand across all market segments, improved storage density and operating costs have become increasingly important. Coraid's new 4TB drive offering delivers tangible savings, including increased power efficiency of up to 25 percent per terabyte, which addresses a key cost and scaling constraint in many data centres today.

“Growing storage demand and requirements for business agility have become a major business challenge for anyone building public and private cloud infrastructure,” said Doug Dooley, vice president of product management at Coraid. “By combining the increased density of 4TB drives with our high-performance scale-out architecture, Coraid enables customers to process cloud-scale data without trading off the performance or resilience of traditional enterprise storage solutions. The use of 4TB drives will also provide substantial savings on rack space, cooling and power, further increasing the value of our new offering.”

Coraid EtherDrive block storage solutions offer flexible building blocks for cloud-scale storage deployments. EtherDrive leverages a massively parallel, connectionless storage networking fabric and software intelligence to aggregate commodity hardware resources and manage them as a pooled resource. EtherDrive offers unparalleled flexibility in how storage infrastructure is deployed. Coraid’s scale-out architecture enables administrators to grow incrementally by adding drives or arrays, without the need for large up-front purchases or forklift upgrades.

EtherDrive makes deploying shared storage as simple as managing a local disk – just plug it in and go. All the capacity of a large RAID set appears to the file system or application as a direct attached disk (DAS), with Ethernet as the backplane. This technological capability, called VDAS, brings together the simplicity of DAS and the flexibility and resiliency of networked storage. Adding capacity just requires plugging in a new appliance, so capacity grows linearly with requirements, without the forklift upgrades or big upfront expenses for controller-based architectures. A massively parallel architecture allows bandwidth to increase linearly with the number of network connections, while providing network redundancy, without the need to configure additional multi-pathing software. Extensive storage automation and one-click provisioning capabilities in EtherCloud simplify the management of storage.