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Press Release - 8 March 2011
Coraid and Arista Networks Team Up To Deliver Ethernet SAN Offering
Redwood City, CA and Santa Clara, CA—Coraid® Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions with more than 1,300 customers worldwide, and Arista Networks, Inc., the pioneer of next-generation data center switching for cloud networking, announced today that the two companies have teamed up to deliver high-performance Ethernet SAN solutions. The combination of Arista 10GbE switches and Coraid EtherDrive® storage arrays provides customers with an unprecedented 5-8x price performance advantage over legacy storage, while simplifying deployment of virtualization and cloud projects.
“Consolidation of storage and virtualization of servers has created demand for a new class of storage area network that addresses the need for higher performance, scalability and agility while controlling cost,” said Doug Gourlay, Vice President of Marketing for Arista Networks. “As data centers transition from legacy Fibre Channel to Ethernet, the performance and simplicity of a 10Gb Ethernet SAN provides a compelling alternative. Arista and Coraid are both innovators in virtual data center infrastructure, and the combined solution delivers unprecedented value.”
“Legacy storage and networking technologies are dragging down the ROI of virtualization and cloud projects worldwide,” said Carl Wright, executive vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Coraid. “Arista and Coraid share a common vision of the modern data center – extensive virtualization, end-to-end Ethernet, flexible topologies, and low cost scale-out hardware. The combination of Arista 10GbE switches with Coraid EtherDrive storage delivers on this vision today, without trading off performance or capabilities.”
Ethernet SAN technologies emerged from the Linux market, based on the open ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol, and have expanded into the virtualization, video, and enterprise markets. In contrast to traditional Fibre Channel storage networks, which grew out of the mainframe era, Ethernet SAN was designed for flexible virtualized workloads and scale-out expansion. The Arista-Coraid stack enables faster performance than Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solutions, at approximately one fifth the cost, and enables storage capacity to be deployed in minutes.
“The ability to couple the easy scalability of Coraid’s Ethernet SAN storage and high-performance 10GbE switching from Arista creates compelling options for Storage Architects that want both high capacity and throughput,” said Paul Evans, Principal Architect at Daystrom Technology Group. “In-depth interoperability testing between Arista and Coraid combined with an all open-standards approach based on Ethernet gives us confidence in both the technology and business elements of Ethernet SANs.”
Both companies have recently unveiled features that enable advanced Ethernet SAN deployments in virtualization and cloud environments. Coraid last week unveiled their EtherDrive VSX-Series storage virtualization appliance, enabling customers to combine Ethernet SAN simplicity and price-performance with advanced management and availability features. The Arista 7500 revolutionary data center switching platform, along with the recently launched Arista Zero Touch Provisioning(ZTP) capabilities empower IT organizations to rapidly expand the capacity of a public or private cloud – adding thousands of servers and storage devices to the network in a matter of minutes.