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CORAID


Ethernet SAN Delivers Faster Performance than Fibre Channel at 20% the cost!

Affordable - Starting at under $600 a terabyte
Fast - Storage units as fast as 1800 MB/s
Scalable - To many petabytes by simply adding more storage units
Virtualized - Single storage unit to a network of sophisticated virtualized storage LUNs
AoE - Built on ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) lightweight SAN protocol
Easy - Easy to buy, Easy to install, Easy to operate.

Coraid® EtherDrive® solutions provide enterprises of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance Ethernet SAN storage. Coraid uniquely delivers the fundamental building blocks for scaling out storage projects for virtualization, disaster recovery, high-performance computing, and cloud storage. Coraid solutions are trusted by more than 1,200 customers in sectors including manufacturing, life sciences, software, healthcare, education, financial services, military, and hosting.

Designed from the ground up for simplicity and virtualization, Coraid EtherDrive enables lower OPEX and up to a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI systems, while dramatically increasing the flexibility of networked storage.

Coraid’s EtherDrive Storage Appliance is a fast and simple alternative to iSCSI and Fibre Channel RAID boxes. EtherDrive storage uses the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage protocol. AoE is a simple way to move storage out of your servers and onto an Ethernet storage network. With AoE, disk read/write requests are placed directly into Ethernet frames. The AoE protocol doesn’t need TCP/IP so it’s easy to process and doesn’t require special network interface cards. EtherDrive storage is accessible and shared by any server/host machine attached to the storage network. Disks inside the storage appliance are assembled into RAID volumes and presented as AoE block storage devices. Servers discover and mount AoE storage devices by using an AoE initiator/driver. The AoE driver presents an AoE device, to the host OS, as a local disk drive. AoE storage is fast and ideally suited for server and desktop virtualization environments.



For more information, call 1.877.548.7200 or visit our website at www.coraid.com

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Simple to Understand, Simple to Manage

The simplicity of EtherDrive Storage makes it easy to manage, because it’s easy to understand. EtherDrive Storage is a disk connected to your server via Ethernet. That disk may actually be a RAID volume, but it just looks like a big disk to the server. No need to learn complicated technology like Fibre Channel. Just add SAS, SSD or SATA disks to the EtherDrive Storage Appliance and you have all the space you want available for any server attached to the AoE storage network. It’s that simple.

Low Cost Network Storage

EtherDrive Storage is less expensive than any other network storage. The storage costs for traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs) are very high. Fibre Channel switches and Host Bus Adapter (HBA) interfaces are expensive, take up a lot of space, and require costly system administration. EtherDrive Storage eliminates all that by being very simple and affordable.

Easy to Install, Easy to Grow

A simple command line interface allows you to create disk RAID volumes (LUNs). JBOD and RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 can be used. You can also expand a RAID set by concatenating RAID sets. You can assign one or more hot spare disks that will automatically backup a failed disk. Alarm and status messages are used to update the host’s syslog.

Performance and Reliability You Want

With each EtherDrive appliance, very high IOPS workloads can be achieved and sustained sequential access speed of over 1800 MB/s. And since the AoE protocol is simple, the host processing load is minimized. Multiple GbE (or 10 GbE) interfaces also provide redundancy for the network connection.

Advanced RAID Controller

EtherDrive uses Coraid’s RAIDShield® algorithm to continuously test each disk in a RAID volume. RAIDShield is able to detect and repair disk “soft failures” before the user discovers them. Soft failures are bad blocks on the disk media that can be re-mapped by the disk itself to spare block locations. This means you won’t be prematurely replacing perfectly good disks that were rejected by a typical RAID controller card when it tries to access one of these soft failed block locations. Coraid’s RAID controller marks each disk with its RAID configuration information. Disks in the chassis have no locational dependency, and can be moved between slots or between chassis without losing the RAID configuration or the user’s data. This makes maintenance easy if you ever need to replace an entire chassis. Coraid’s RAID algorithm is open and published as part of AoE tools on sourceforge.net. Your data is never captive to a proprietary RAID controller. In an emergency RAID volumes can be unraveled and data recovered one disk at a time using any Linux host. Isn’t that comforting to know?

About Coraid, Inc.

Coraid redefines storage economics with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive storage solutions. EtherDrive delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy storage. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and reliability, Coraid solutions have been deployed by more than 1,200 customers worldwide. For more information, visit www.coraid.com or call 1-877-548-7200.