Coraid Adds 4TB Drives to Ethernet Storage Systems

Storage has always been about which vendor can make the most data available at the fastest speeds possible.

This week, Coraid laid claim to both by adding 4TB SATA drives to its EtherDrive SRX storage systems, which, instead of relying on traditional storage protocols such as FibreChannel or iSCSI, make use of raw Ethernet to make all that storage appear as though it were directly attached to a server. The end result, claims Coraid, is the ability to access 1.4 petabytes of data at throughput rates of up to 1,800 MB per second and wind up costing as little as 40 cents a gigabyte.

According to Coraid CEO Kevin Brown, in the era of Big Data, organizations will need to be able to not only access massive amounts of data, they need storage systems that can keep pace with next-generation, in-memory computing systems that will process data at blinding speeds.

Coraid relies on an ATA-over-Ethernet (AOE) protocol that takes full advantage of the 10 Gb Ethernet to provide access to both solid-state disks and traditional hard disks. And with the cost of 40 Gb and 100 Gb Ethernet technology continuing to drop, Brown sees no end to the scalability scenarios.

In addition, Brown notes that support for a RESTful API means the Coraid storage systems can be managed via almost every management platform, including those based on the emerging OpenStack platform.

At the moment, Brown says that Coraid already has 1,700 customers using its systems today. With each new Big Data application that comes to market, Brown says he expects that number to increase exponentially as organizations continue to run into the real-world performance limitations of traditional Fibre channel and iSCSI storage systems.