Storage Solutions

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There are many applications for CORAID storage across many solution scenarios. Below are a few examples showing the diversity of CORAID storage, along with a selection of product data sheets. Download the CORAID feature benefits summary, and contact us to find out more about what we can do for your particular requirement.

Server Virtualization

Virtualization has transformed the data centre and is changing all aspects of IT operations. Greater demands on storage and availability require high speed shared storage, and incorrect storage types can cause bottlenecks in performance in this environment. Current SAN technologies (Fibre Channel, iSCSI) are too expensive, too complex, and poorly adapted for dynamic virtualization workloads. EtherDrive was purpose-built for these challenges. CORAID has radically simplified virtual storage networking with AoE (ATA over Ethernet) which runs on top of Ethernet, enabling unique advantages for virtualized environments: massive bandwidth to disks, less head contention, more independent disk heads, unlimited scalability (>60k nodes). For more details see our VMware SAN page.

An HBA for Windows is now available, extending virtualization support to the Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V platform with up to 4500 IOPS per disk (SAS) shelf now available to the Windows platform.

Further details are available from the Coraid VMware Solution Brief (PDF).

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Coraid storage is especially suited to VDI in that it provides a simple shared storage framework with high IOPS, which are the key to delivering a successful VDI project. As a project scales to hundreds or thousands of desktops then the use of Solid State Disks (SSDs) becomes much more economical. Using a Coraid SRX3500 chassis and 24 2.5" SSDs, enough IOPS are available to run over 2000 Windows 7 desktops - all from a 2U storage unit! This incredible rack dense and power conserving solution makes Enterprise desktop virtualization a much more viable solution for large virtual scale desktop rollouts, when compared to using banks of classic magnetic disks to provide the IOPS necessary.

We take a closer look at this hot topic in our VDI blog entry.

Further details on VDI solutions with SATA disks are available from the Coraid VDI Solution Brief (PDF).

High Performance Storage Server

EtherDrive® Server Platforms are fully integrated with EtherDrive SAN storage offering unlimited storage capacity. Advanced features include options for 10 Gb Ethernet LAN and SAN interconnect, SSD caching, high performance CPU and memory options, support for Windows, OpenSolaris/ZFS, Linux or ESX/ESXi operating systems. Sustained throughputs approaching 2 GigaBytes per second have been achieved with this storage system, and this has become an integral part of continuing development into the high definition media space.

Media Entertainment industry

In an exciting devolpment Coraid has become a provider for several digital media entertainment companies using Digital Film Technology (DFT), and in fact Coraid is the highest price/performance storage ever to be successfully used with DFT products - It handily outperforms competitive fibre channel and iSCSI solutions.

For a closer look at how Coraid is smashing the price/performance barrier in DFT download the Coraid Media Solution Brief (PDF).

Hosted Storage

CORAID storage is popular among hosting companies for obvious reasons – commodity storage economics, high performance and extreme flexibility are mission critical. Service level requirements of hosting companies need to be met at all times, requiring assurance of performance and reliability in their SAN storage solutions. This industry is quickly discovering that EtherDrive is not only fast, reliable and easier to manage, it allows them to scale non-disruptively as their business evolves.

High Performance Computing

The unique and growing challenges of High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Virtual Computing (HPVC) environments are a natural fit for CORAID's scale-out architecture. CORAID users have employed EtherDrive in large-scale supercomputing environments for human genome research, energy research, and government security applications.

Further details are available from the Coraid HPC Solution Brief (PDF).

Video/Network Surveillance

Storage for video and network surveillance is a high-growth market. This is another industry equally sensitive to costs and high throughput rates – with just-in-time capacity growth options. In the rapid shift from analogue to digital video, a huge market has been created seemingly overnight for solutions such as EtherDrive, with affordable, high performance scale-out architectures. High-definition digital cameras are producing between 4-5x the amount of data as standard cameras. (Example: 100HD cameras can easily produce 300TB per week, quickly moving into the petabyte range.)

Business Continuity / Disaster recovery

Although the AoE protocol is by definition non routable due to working at Layer 2, it is possible to direct data to remote sites by utilising the WAN gateway (product sheet below). This receives the data packets and breaks them up into the 1500 MTU size needed for Internet transmission, and then allows a VPN to be used to transmit to another site, where they are reassembled into the larger jumbo frames the storage units use.

This allows for the requirement to be met for large pools of data, or data held on remote sites and accessible via a WAN connection. A remote backup site can therefore be rapidly provisioned without expensive replication systems, or if required a fully replicated SAN system can be created utilising the Coraid VSX storage virtualisation appliance.

Latest News! A new paper has been released detailing how AoE can be routed securely between sites using MPLS. We look into it in our blog, which contains a link to the full paper to download.