Digibug

John Treadway isn't worried about taking the road less traveled. When the CEO of online photo commerce provider Digibug went looking for a better way to store and serve photo files quickly on the Internet, he wasn't put off by what some consider a proprietary solution from a smaller vendor.

Instead, Treadway and his team picked a storage networking product from Coraid Inc. , which, along with Zetera, has the distinction of offering an alternative to iSCSI for companies interested in IP SANs. (See Proprietary Gear Seeks Foothold.)

Like Zetera, Coraid deploys an alternative to TCP in the TCP/IP stack. In Coraid's case, that means AOE (ATA-Over-Ethernet), which enables servers to view a RAID array as a local drive, allowing the use of existing Ethernet NICs for the transfer of block-level storage data to the arrays.

Coraid sells its EtherDrive product as a chassis equipped to handle 15 disks, starting at $3,995. Users can add their own SATA drives, or Coraid will do that if need be. The chassis are compatible with Linux, Solaris, and via third-party software maker Rocket Division Software, Windows.

According to Coraid CEO Jim Kemp, his solution is cheaper and easier to use than iSCSI. "iSCSI has a whole TCP/IP stack. We're not disparaging that, but the stacks are often unnecessary," when what users really want is simplicity, Kemp adds.That simplicity is what attracted Digibug's Treadway. "Our needs are fairly simple -- we have a large fixed-content archive of user images that is growing at 1 to 2 Tbytes per month," he states. Digibug's core business is hosting photos that can be used by online providers of gifts, photo prints, and cards. "What it came down to is that we needed a very basic level of functionality -- store the files quickly and serve them quickly to either browsers or our printing vendors... This is an ecommerce application, but the content [images] ... dwarfs the transactional data."

Treadway evaluated iSCSI and Fiber Channel solutions in both NAS and SAN configurations before opting for Coraid. He won't name the other vendors he researched. In the end, he felt Coraid delivered performance, reliability, and ease of management at half the cost of what he would get with iSCSI and more than half the pricetag of FC.

In fact, Treadway liked Coraid enough to replace a midrange iSCSI solution he already had in house with Coraid. "[We] have taken that out to save money because there was no performance of functional degradation with Coraid," he says.

Treadway insists he wasn't put off by working with a vendor that was both small and non-standard. "We were concerned with them being the only vendor of AOE on the market," he says. "But, the model works and doesn't require any special HBAs or initiators to use them. The fact that the drivers are in RedHat helped. They have a solid solution and it clearly resonates with companies like Digibug where we live and die by the costs of our infrastructure. We were willing to take the risk and have done well with Coraid."

This is music to the ears of Jim Kemp, who claims Coraid's solution is working for close to 500 customers, many of which have multiple installations of his product.On the downside, Coraid's solution is purely local, aimed at users who need fast and easy storage via the Ethernet LAN in their data center or within their building.

And what of allegations that Coraid is using what one analyst has called "vendor lock-in with open-source software?" Kemp says Coraid has published all the specs for its solution, even though Coraid remains the sole implementer of said specs. And as long as people keep using it, he's not concerned with the scuttlebutt. "We have serviced a portion of the market that needs scalable storage and doesn't have a lot of money to pay for it. The time has come for this application."

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch