CORAID - A Disruptive Technology In The World Of Storage

On March 23rd, CORAID - a California-based storage provider - announced availability of their new EtherDrive SRX Series storage arrays and extended family of Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for high-speed Ethernet SAN connectivity for Windows, Solaris and Linux environments. With the announcement, CORAID delivers compelling price/performance characteristics that most certainly make its technology a disruptive entry in the storage market and an attractive offering for users who need connectivity and speed more than a laundry list of storage platform-based software offerings.

The new EtherDrive SRX Series supports both 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet connectivity to the host via CORAID Ethernet adapters. CORAID supports what they call "port flooding" by installing additional HBAs and port connectivity in the SRX Series arrays. The port flooding capability has proven to be advantageous to CORAID customers who need to leverage the raw speed and throughput of the Ethernet based arrays. Plus, there is no need to layer in multi-path software as CORAID's HBA based AOE (ATA Over Ethernet) protocol handles all pathing and availability requirements. The storage array supports SATA, SAS and SSD devices and is compact as it fits in a 2U shelf. It's clear this storage platform is purpose-built for those who have a need for speed.

One of CORAID's customers, Tableau Publishing, has deployed CORAID EtherDrive arrays in order to provide its global, web-based, data visualization capability to thousands of users all over the world. Part of CORAID's attractiveness is its ability to quickly deploy Ethernet SAN storage without having to spend days to re-architect the storage connectivity infrastructure, as is typical with many Fibre Channel SAN environments. The SRX go-to-market is 100 percent via CORAID channel partners, and customers/users will have a variety of supplier and support choices.

I had the opportunity to spend some time speaking with CORAID's CEO, Kevin Brown (formerly of Decru and then NETAP after acquisition). He's excited about the newly released storage and HBAs. Also - and rightly so - he is extremely excited about the future for his Ethernet-based products as the speed of Ethernet continues to increase to 40Gbs per second and on to 100Gbs per second. 

Brown said that "support for Ethernet-based storage, which looks like a SCSI disk to the host server, has been in the Linux kernel since 2005" and "as Ethernet speed increases we will be in position to provide even greater performance and functionality in our storage arrays." We also talked about the array's support for mirroring and virtualization of the LUNs on the back-end of the architecture, and that snapshot copy will be forth coming. It was good to hear that CORAID truly did develop a purpose-built storage platform and not try to boil the ocean with numerous array software offerings. All of that can come in the future as higher speed Ethernet rolls out, and the SRX is deployed in other than high-speed oriented application environments.CORAID has been shipping products since 2004 and has over 1,100 customers using various CORAID products. The company has been in business since 2000 and has focused on delivering products that provide price/performance characteristics which enable customers to have a choice between low cost with speed and increased costs with more platform based functionality. The new SRX series pricing starts at $500 per terabyte and scales to multiple petabytes. The company claims that the SRX delivers 5 to 8X greater performance compared to Fibre Channel and iSCSI SAN storage solutions.

It does appear that the SRX arrays are simpler to deploy that Fibre Channel arrays. While I certainly believe the company's performance claims, CORAID would greatly benefit from supporting independent performance analyses which compare and contrast the performance claims. These could be especially helpful for the company as it embarks on positioning the SRX in the omnipresent Cloud space. From a Virtual Server perspective, the SRX and HBA's are already rocking-and-rolling in the VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environment and they are completing beta testing now in the Linux/Citrix Zen environment (desk top and server) - that, from all indications, will ship this quarter.

In my opinion, as the company enters new application environments more storage platform-based software functionality will be introduced that could enable this product line to be a serious contender in the enterprise storage space where platform functions such as snapshots, consistency groups and a selection of remote replication capabilities are the norm. CORAID appears to be focused, ready and planning for a long stay in the storage market. CORAID has entered the high performance storage ball game, stepped up to the plate, and is ready to hit the ball out of the park with its new SRX series array and host bus adapters. For those with the need for speed at the storage level, CORAID should be on your short list.