Coraid Intros AOE Appliance

SAN FRANCISCO -- Coraid, the originator of the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage protocol, today announced the introduction of the worlds first AoE Logical Volume Manager, the EtherDrive® VS21 VirtualStorage™ Appliance. Unveiled at the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, this new appliance takes array based virtualization out of the RAID box and puts it on the storage network to manage an unlimited amount of AoE storage. Logical Volume Management is storage virtualization that is filesystem independent and improves storage utilization by making a virtual pool of physical storage easy to allocate for any application across multiple OS platforms. Combining fast AoE storage with Logical Volume Management allows users to adjust their storage pool quickly and easily as usage patterns change.

"Coraid introduced AoE to the open source community in 2003 and customer acceptance of AoE as a fast, affordable alternative to Fibre Channel or iSCSI has been growing rapidly." said James Kemp, CEO of Coraid. "Today we are making AoE storage even simpler to use across heterogeneous networks by introducing the most useful, cost effective storage virtualization appliance available. With the EtherDrive VS21 VirtualStorage Appliance, customers can now easily tailor and configure their storage for any application."

How it Works

VS21 takes advantage of the simplicity of the AoE protocol to perform fast on-the-fly block address translation with redirection to create up to 255 Logical Volumes of arbitrary size. EtherDrive physical volumes (RAID volumes) are assembled into Volume Groups. Volume Groups are divided up into small chunks called “Extents.” Logical Volumes are created by allocating Extents from a Volume Group. These Logical Volumes can be dynamically re-sized at any time without requiring the volume to be taken out of service. The VS21 also provides volume replication/mirroring and snap shots, making it a good choice for businesses with large storage requirements.

Coraid Inc.