SAN Storage: Coraid's Record Growth Validates AoE Storage
Triples customers year-on-year, Increases revenue 370%
SAN Storage well under $1 per GigaByte for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows
Coraid, Inc., the originator of the AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) storage protocol, today announced it has ended its 2006 fiscal year with three times the number of customers and almost four times the revenue over 2005. Coraid has experienced six consecutive quarters of profitability and growth, expanding its customer base by over 300 new customers in 2006, including Government Agencies, Hosting Service Providers, System Integrators and Universities. Today, Coraid has well over 500 customers using their EtherDrive® storage products. EtherDrive® storage has been integrated into high performance, massively scalable networked storage solutions for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows-based environments.
"The record growth we are experiencing reflects the ever growing market demand for simple, low cost, scalable disk storage for today's increasingly data hungry applications," said Jim Kemp, CEO, Coraid.
Coraid EtherDrive® Storage products use standard Ethernet and the open AoE storage protocol to provide fast, low cost and scalable networked storage with none of the complexities, overhead or costs typically associated with iSCSI or Fibre Channel based systems. AoE eliminates the need for expensive ToE (TCP/IP off-load Engine) cards or HBAs (Host Bus Adapters). Using AoE enables disks to be shared on a network, creating a highly scalable storage system at the lowest possible price.
Coraid customers include government organizations: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, U.S. Geological Survey, National Information Infrastructure Development (NIIF) Program in Hungary, FBI, NOAA/PMEL, Pacific Northwest National Labs, NSCEE, the National Institute of Health, UCAR, National Library of Finland, the US Army, the US Navy, the US Air Force, the Atomic Energy of Canada, and the Louisiana Dept of Agriculture & Forestry. University customers include UCLA, UC Merced, MIT, Penn State University, Northwestern University, York College, Utah State, University of Texas, Texas A&M, Colorado State, Baylor University, SUNY Potsdam, University of Alaska, SCT BOCES, Rutgers University, Purdue, McNeese State, Harvard, Loma Linda University, Auburn University, and the Indiana University School of Medicine. Other customers include New Dream Networks, Nuance, Engine Yard, Jupiter Media, DigiBug, Hostway, Hospital Billing & Collection Services, Learninghall, Mediabolic, Mediaguide, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, LockNET, Linspire, Lingotek, Mitre Corp, OrthoScan, OxBlue Corporation, Pixelgate, PS GoLive, PackeTalk, PacketFront, Reflectivity, Placemark Investments, and Rogue Wave Software, as a glimpse into the growing customer base.
Moving the bar to address customer demands
Coraid extended its market reach by expanding its network of system integration partners. Savvy system integrators around the world are discovering that they can take Coraid storage appliances and construct powerful system solutions with high value and high margin. EtherDrive® storage is ideally suited for system integrators; they add hardware and software components to provide custom solutions to fit their client's needs.
With data requirements exploding at a rapid pace, enterprises are increasingly looking at cost effective strategies that provide the features they need. "Our customers tell me they select Coraid because we offer reliable storage with the features they want, at the best possible price," continues Kemp. "We continue to develop the product based on customer feedback, and integrate features and functions to simplify storage administration, increase reliability and availability, all with a focus on making network storage affordable."
Adding value for customers
Helping to improve disk integrity, Coraid introduced RAIDShield™ disk protection to its ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage appliances in 2006. RAIDShield technology improves the reliability of RAID volumes through an advanced disk fault detection and recovery algorithm, eliminating the risk of data failure on high density SATA disk storage systems. With RAIDShield disk protection, a background testing routine continuously tests each disk within the EtherDrive Storage Appliance and attempts to repair bad disks before data loss can occur.
Early in 2006, Coraid enhanced its CLN20 NAS Gateway with new failover technology that eliminated the single-point-of-failure dilemma. The CLN20 delivers redundancy and seamless protection for NFS and CIFS clients using the file sharing services of a NAS. By introducing fault tolerant redundancy, Coraid was able to offer high availability at one-tenth of the price of other systems.
Coraid continues to contribute to the open source community by expanding the usefulness of AoE by releasing new source code programs as part of the source forge project called AoE tools.
Coraid released the SRCAT RAID recovery tool to insure user data is always accessible. SRCAT provide users an open source way to read stored data from disks removed from an EtherDrive Storage Appliance. While other RAID controllers use proprietary methods to store data on disks, Coraid makes data freely available and ensures that data retrieval does not have to be costly or tied to a single vendor.
In 2006, Coraid worked with the open Etherboot project to enable AoE storage to become a boot device located on an Ethernet network. Etherboot can be used to network boot Linux thin clients, centrally managed Linux workstations, embedded systems, and other applications. By enabling Etherboot to allow a server to boot directly from AoE storage, servers can be assembled without disk drives and boot directly from an AoE-based storage device on the network. Additionally, network booting using AoE allows all servers on the network to boot using the same code, an increasingly popular way to ease the burden of software administration. Etherboot code is available under the GNU Public License (GPL) and is available at www.etherboot.org. Etherboot is also available for purchase on a preconfigured NIC card supplied by Coraid.
The Industry's Most Cost Effective Network Storage moves into new markets
In 2006 AoE drivers for Mac OS X and Solaris operating systems were announced. Coraid developed the Solaris driver for the AoE protocol, as well as drivers for, Free BSD and Linux. Since AoE is an open storage protocol, Rocket Division Software developed and released an AoE driver in 2005 for Windows, providing a simple user interface to mount disks on Windows-based networks. At the MacWorld show in January 2007, 2 Degrees Frost Software announced their Mac OS X software driver for the AoE protocol. The Mac OS X AoE driver is now integral to storage solutions provided by 2 Degrees Frost Data Solutions. Today, as a result of these joint efforts, Coraid supports a wide range of operating systems from Linux to Windows, as well as Solaris and Mac OS X.
To learn more about Coraid's products, please visit www.coraid.com. The AoE protocol specification is available for preview and download from: www.coraid.com/documents/AoEr8.txt.
About Coraid,Inc.
Coraid's SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage platform won the Product Excellence Award for Best Data Backup and Storage Solution at the Linux World Expo 2005 in San Francisco. Coraid designs and manufactures innovative, affordable networked storage appliances based on the "power of simple." Coraid also developed the open AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) protocol used by the EtherDrive storage product line. AoE leverages the cost advantages of Ethernet to provide true networked storage. For more information, please contact Coraid at +1-706-548-7200, e-mail sales@coraid.com or visit www.coraid.com.