Millennia® are UK Gold Partners for Coraid® EtherDrive® solutions, providing the complete range of services from hardware aquisition through to deployment support for your chosen storage scenario.
Ethernet SAN Delivers Faster Performance than Fibre Channel at 20% of the cost
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.
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 1000 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 unravelled and data recovered one disk at a time using any Linux host. Isn’t that comforting to know?
If your organization is struggling to keep up with exponential data growth while providing ever higher levels of performance and availability,
then please mail us, or call on 0845 0569730, to discuss your situation further under no obligation.
