With the launch of Grizzly, the new stable version of Openstack, it’s worth looking at what the technology presents to the storage market and where the channel can benefit. Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid gives his view on this disruptive new technology.

Iceland-based media company 365 Media has opted for ATA-over-Ethernet storage from Coraid for its broadcast programming archive.

Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge blogs about Coraid adding 4TB SATA drives to its EtherDrive SRX storage systems, providing the ability to access 1.4 petabytes of data at throughput rates of up to 1,800 MB per second, and costing as little as 40 cents a gigabyte.

Take advantage of the new class of commercial technologies emerging to enable Amazon-like automation and economics for private clouds – the software-defined datacentre (SDDC).

Hot on the heels of cloud computing, the latest step-change in storage virtualization is software-defined storage (SDS). This guide profiles SDS vendors to consider when looking to implement SDS.

Chin-Fah Heoh, storage evangelist and Chairman of SNIA Malaysia, blogs about how Coraid's storage architecture has fewer layers - resulting in higher data delivery throughput, lower latency in response time, higher security, and lower management costs.

Industry experts review the year ahead. Coraid CEO Kevin Brown predicts that big iron storage will become obsolete, and software-defined storage will heat up.

The storage industry’s movers and shakers discuss what to keep an eye on in 2013. Relentless data growth will accentuate the limitations of traditional storage architectures built on legacy technologies like Fibre Channel.

Mike Matchett, Senior Analyst & Consultant at Taneja Group, blogs about the tremendous IT efficiencies of having only one low-level, low-cost storage infrastructure.

Cormac Hogan, senior technical marketing architect within the Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing group at VMware, blogs about Coraid AoE, EtherDrive, and EtherCloud.

The highly successful IPO of Shutterstock earlier today may be one of the clearest examples yet of how new designs in corporate data centers are enabling new kinds of business models.

Coraid EtherDrive honored as bronze winner for Information Technology Hardware in the 2012 Golden Bridge Awards. The 2012 Golden Bridge Awards is the fourth annual industry and peers recognition program honoring the world’s best companies in every major industry from large to small and new start-ups.

Coraid named to The Wall Street Journal's 2012 "Next Big Thing" list. The Next Big Thing is The Wall Street Journal's third annual ranking the 50 most promising venture-backed companies in the U.S., selected from a pool of 6,000 startups.

Enrico Signoretti, Founder of Juku Consulting, blogs about how vendors that are working on next generation storage architectures are building their products on few, but fundamental pillars: commodity, strong parallelization/scale-out, Flash, ethernet, software and APIs.

Bloomberg Businessweek names Coraid one of the Hot Enterprise Startups. This disparate collection of companies is attacking the Old Guard of the enterprise tech business with a common weapon: software.

Coraid epitomizes the underlying theme of this year's VMWorld, "software-defined networking" and "software-defined data centers" because its new-generation arrays are automated to handle Ethernet storage area network (SAN) storage for cloud deployments. (Slide 12)

Coraid, maker of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) technology, today announced EtherCloud, which is based on technology Coraid acquired from cloud orchestration vendor Yungteq. EtherCloud lets businesses architect with REST APIs cloud data centers based on scale-out building blocks and Ethernet.

Coraid on Wednesday unveiled EtherFlash™ Cache, a flexible programmable cache that uses solid-state drives (SSDs) to accelerate read performance for demanding server virtualization, web, database and email applications. Users can provision and then rapidly re-assign application priorities in the cache to provide a performance boost to the applications that need it most.

Coraid EtherCloud introduces a powerful policy engine and automation framework that enables one-click provisioning of sophisticated enterprise storage configurations, simplifying capacity and performance management.

Coraid has unveiled EtherCloud – its software-defined storage infrastructure platform. EtherCloud will offer IT admins much greater flexibility to run their data centre, including one-click storage provisioning.

Coraid today announced EtherFlash Cache, a programmable SSD cache solution that accelerates read performance, and EtherCloud, which aims to allow enterprise and cloud customers to provision and manage petabytes of block and file storage with the simplicity of consumer cloud services.

The race is on to make every part of the data center — from switches to storage arrays — software configurable. That’s the rationale behind Coraid’s new EtherCloud storage platform. 

As time goes by, IT managers are asked to do more with less. Budgets are flat, but the amount of work and the amount of data continues to increase year on year. This pressure is really felt during the summer months when IT managers have to try and manage their environments while people are out on holiday. Below are four best practices for managing storage and staff to maximise work flow efficiency and get more done, with fewer resources.

For many organizations, the path to a private cloud seems almost preordained. Once they’ve invested in virtualization and consolidated servers, they believe that private clouds are the next logical step.

Moving to the cloud isn’t as easy as many cloud vendors would have you believe, especially for large enterprises. Pundits cite concerns like security and compliance as reasons that large enterprises will be late adopters, but there’s an equally compelling and often overlooked factor: legacy investments.

Storage systems have rapidly evolved to become more open and modular. Storage data services and features that used to only be available on proprietary hardware platforms are now available through software, either as a file system or in applications themselves. These software solutions can provide all the features that IT expects like access, volume management, thin provisioning, and snapshots, but provides it agnostically across storage hardware.

Coraid named to 2012 AlwaysOn Global 250 list. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the AlwaysOn Global 250 - a list of the top private technology companies that are combining infrastructure and software innovations to create an interconnected, global technology community.

Designed for cloud, video and big data customers, Coraid's ZX unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid's EtherDrive technology to enable scalability, performance and operational simplicity.

The secret sauce for scale-out storage is the use of storage clustering or virtualization software. Such software can spread data among storage nodes yet still treat a group of nodes as a unified storage pool through a common set of metadata. Conceptually, it’s similar to RAID, but the atomic storage units are complete storage nodes. These are what Coraid CEO Kevin Brown calls RAIN, redundant array of independent nodes, each of which uses RAID on the inside.

Ethernet SAN vendor Coraid has appointed Exclusive Networks as its sole UK distributor as it aims to break the back of the UK market. The vendor, which boasts more than 1,500 global customers, is looking to replicate the success it has enjoyed in its native US on this side of the pond.

Coraid on Tuesday introduced the ZX-Series NAS servers which use the ZFS file system. 

Network World profiles Coraid's new ZX-Series as a Product of the Week.

Coraid has announced its ZX-Series filer head, which is now an Oracle ZFS-based product. It has also beat off some pretty big competition to score Sony as a marquee user of its EtherDrive storage product.

Coraid unveiled Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers, their unified storage solution powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system.

Combines ZFS and Scale-out Ethernet SAN for Cloud, Video and Big Data Workloads

Coraid has announced its new ZX-Series family of servers for cloud, video, and big data. The ZX-Series is powered by the ZFS file system along with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology, which abstracts distributed SAN storage as a local disk.

Coraid delivers enterprise-class storage based on a new scale-out, file-based architecture using Ethernet connectivity.

Coraid, a next-generation virtualized storage networking provider that is rapidly gaining industry traction, on July 17 launched a new line of Ethernet networked-attached storage servers for midrange and larger enterprises.

London, United Kingdom – Exclusive Networks UK today announced that it has been selected by Coraid, a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,500 customers worldwide, as its sole distributor as the company looks to develop its business in the UK and replicate the success it has seen in the US.

Coraid Inc. today said it is bringing out a ZFS-based network attached storage (NAS) appliance that works with the vendor's Ethernet block storage arrays, two years after the vendor scrapped its original plans to deliver a similar ZFS NAS system.

Ethernet SAN vendor Coraid announced a new family of products today that offers more scalability and more throughput to accommodate not only traditional workloads but also video and unstructured data.

Coraid has today released its new ZX-Series family of NAS servers which integrate with its existing EtherDrive SAN to create a high performance unified (NAS/SAN) storage solution supporting block and file data. It is powered by Oracle Solaris ZFS file system.

Want to find out about the future?  Just meet the startups because they are inventing it right in front of our eyes.

That is exactly what happend in the fast moving storage industry yesterday in Silicon Valley.

I had a chance to meet with the top startups, Nimble storage and Coraid to name a few, at the #ExecEvent Big Data conference in Santa Clara.  I was very impressed with the direction of both companies.

With enterprises steadily expanding their cloud computing deployments, traditional Fibre Channel storage architectures are falling out of step with the elastic, scalable requirements that cloud and big data applications demand, according to Coraid, a startup specializing in alternative storage arrays.

Coraid's pitch is to pair commodity hardware and Ethernet with its own software to create an Ethernet SAN storage array it calls EtherDrive, for which it touts significant price savings and performance improvements over legacy storage.

A Cloud Compute infrastructure is built by adding processing power (in the form of servers) as you need it and then shifting workloads (in the form of virtual machines) onto those servers. Ethernet Cloud Storage, as proposed by Coraid, brings a similar concept to storage. When more capacity or performance is needed, users simply attach another Coraid storage shelf to an Ethernet network and start writing to it.

Press:Here – the NBC weekly roundtable of interviews with Silicon Valley CEOs and entrepreneurs – talks with Kevin Brown, Coraid CEO, about how Coraid helps the world store a staggering amount of information.

Business demand for technology continually increases, but businesses have no tolerance for waste. This forces IT into a survival-of-the-fittest mode, ridding the data center of underperforming products -- and storage is currently under fire.

2011 was a busy year for IT professionals, with many trade shows and conferences on the calendar; from SNW to VMworld via IP Expo and CeBIT, old and new events are vying for vendors and resellers’ budget and end users’ time. And although each show had a different focus, some technologies were the subject of numerous discussions across the board. So here is what we heard and what seem to be the big trends for 2012 and beyond...

Would you choose to work direct with a US-based company that had no local representation? Five years ago, probably not – too risky. But for Dan Byne, IT Manager at Palmers College in Essex, that potential risk was outweighed by what he thought he could gain from such a relationship – and in the end, did.

Coraid, which already claims to offer Ethernet-attached storage that offers a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy storage, is readying complete thin provisioning capability for an imminent launch, CBR has learned.

Thanks to x86 and other "commodity" components, users usually get good value for money from their server systems. However, storage subsystems and their connectivity remain stubbornly complex and costly. This has got to change - and for some this has started to happen.

From 20+ servers in 2009 to just three servers now, a virtualisation and data centre consolidation project at Palmer’s College helped improve IT efficiency and save on data centre cooling costs.

Coraid has partnered with Transcend United Technologies, LLC, a Pennsylvania-based global IT systems integration and managed services firm, announced a partnership that delivers Ethernet SAN storage for Transcend United cloud services.

Transcend United Technologies has partnered with Coraid to provide next-generation Ethernet SAN storage for Transcend United cloud services.

Coraid ranked #3 in Storage Newsletter's list of the top 15 Most Promising Storage Start-Ups in 2012.

A year after snagging $25m in venture capital funding Coraid has gone back to the cash well and scooped up another $50m. The VCs think Coraid is going places.

Storage vendor Coraid, demonstrating that venture capital funding for IT companies is far from dried up, on Thursday unveiled a new $50-million investment in the company that included Seagate as a participant.

Coraid, a developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions, this morning announced that it has closed a sizable $50 million series C round led by Crosslink Capital. Coraid’s existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners and affiliates of Silver Lake all participated in the round, as well as new investors including Seagate Technology and Kinetic Ventures.

Coraid is banking that the commoditization craze that gutted server prices before spilling into networking gear, is now affecting storage. The company’s stance is that its reliance on cheap, off-the-shelf hardware running its software on simple Ethernet networks make it a cost-effective option.

Coraid Inc., a maker of data-storage devices for businesses, raised $50 million from an investor group led by Crosslink Capital to expand its product engineering team and global operations.

It is the kind of startup that doesn't feel like a startup at all, says its CEO Kevin Brown of his more than 100-employee company that now has over 1,500 customers worldwide in 45 countries.

These days, it can prove downright daunting to keep pace with the constant strides storage vendors are making in the industry. This is especially true when it comes to flash storage, a technology that has not only emerged as a major disruptor but also spawned an array of products – many of which add unnecessary complexity to enterprise-level storage environments.

Enter Coraid, which has upgraded its EtherDrive Ethernet SAN platform to support an all-flash configuration called EtherFlash. This new solution provides high performance, low-latency access to flash drives sans the bottlenecks and limitations inherent with legacy storage and Fibre Channel networks. I spoke last week with Kevin Brown, Coraid’s CEO, about how his company is breaking new ground in the SAN space and the beauty of being able to offer an enormously flexible “one tier for all” storage product.

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, announced the acquisition of Yunteq, Inc., a provider of cloud orchestration software for public and private clouds founded in 2009. 

Coraid, the developer of the simplest Ethernet SAN storage, has bought cloud orchestration software maker Yunteq.

Coraid, a developer of Ethernet storage networking solutions, is making a bid for the cloud storage market with the acquisition of cloud orchestration software developer Yunteq.

Coraid Inc., a developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, announced Wednesday acquisition of Yunteq Inc., a provider of cloud orchestration software for public and private clouds. Coraid’s Ethernet SAN platform eliminates multiple layers of traditional SAN complexity, providing an ideal platform for an automated, elastic storage infrastructure.

Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions , announced the acquisition of Yunteq, Inc., a provider of cloud orchestration software for public and private clouds. Coraid’s groundbreaking Ethernet SAN platform eliminates multiple layers of traditional SAN complexity, providing the ideal platform for an automated, elastic storage infrastructure. Yunteq’s sophisticated resource management framework and policy-driven orchestration engine automate provisioning and policies at the network, storage, and security layers, reducing operating expenses and providing an ideal complement to Coraid’s breakthrough Ethernet SAN architecture.

Ethernet SAN solutions developer Coraid Inc has acquired Yunteq Inc, a provider of cloud orchestration software for public and private clouds, the company said today.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Redwood City-based Coraid develops EtherDrive storage technologies and has more than 1,400 customers. Yunteq's technology is expected to complement Coraid's Ethernet storage area network architecture.

Ethernet SAN solutions provider Coraid (www.coraid.com) announced on Wednesday it has acquired cloud software provider Yunteq (http://yunteq.com). The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Today Coraid Inc. acquired cloud orchestration company Yunteq Inc. and plans to use the technology from the startup to accelerate its plans to build Ethernet storage-area networks (SANs) for public cloud storage providers.

Caringo, Inc. and Coraid Inc. announced an unified storage infrastructure for scale-out block and object storage.

The combined solution provides customers with operational flexibility by integrating the scalability and ease of management of object storage with elastic, high-performance Ethernet SAN storage. The Caringo-Coraid solution is suited for cloud computing, large enterprises, video and big data environments struggling with the growth of unstructured data.
 

Although many enterprises are moving applications and other processes to the cloud, data backups and storage are still often local. On-site storage seem easier to control and secure, yet it’s costly to administer and leaves organizations vulnerable should a natural disaster hit.

Moreover, bottlenecks often form at the local level, especially when integrating remote applications and assets with those managed on-site.

Most organizations with a cloud presence have an eye toward using the cloud for data storage. But with a variety of cloud storage vendors to choose from, it’s important to ask the following questions to assure valuable digital assets are managed efficiently and effectively...
 

Caringo is mating its technology with that of Coraid. The object is to pair its object storage system with Coraid arrays, accessible by AoE, said to be the simplest storage network in the world.

Cloud remains the predominant marketing term in the IT industry. In one sense I like how it sparks innovation and new IT thinking but on the other hand it makes my stomach turn every time I hear it. I just completed a week in Las Vegas attending my 7th VMworld and most of what I saw was on par with my expectations. 

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, unveiled the EtherFlash solution, which provides performance, low-latency access to flash drives without the bottlenecks and limitations of legacy storage and FC networks.

When things heat up in the boardroom, Coraid’s CEO Kevin Brown, heads to the kitchen. His four passions are networking, storage, virtualization AND gourmet. 

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, announced EtherDrive SAN Manager(ESM) 1.5, a management platform which provides integration with VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft VSS and pools storage resources for simplified storage operations. 

Calif.-based Coraid showed its latest EtherFlash solution for high performance, low latency access to Flash drives.

Offering high performance, low-latency access to flash drives without the bottlenecks and limitations of legacy storage and Fiber Channel networks, Coraid has introduced the Coraid EtherFlash solution, the company has announced.

Our round-up of intriguing new products from Cisco, Coraid, VKernel among others.

Coraid rolled out the CoraidEtherFlash array, consisting of Coraid’s EtherDrive SRX storage arrays, solid-state drives and the vendor’s new CorOS operating system optimized for managing data on SSDs. 

Coraid Inc., has announced Coraid EtherDrive SAN Manager (ESM) 1.5, its newest management platform which provides integration with VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft VSS. The platform pools storage resources for simplified storage operations by eliminating multiple layers of SAN complexity and enabling automation in virtualized and cloud computing environments.

Coraid, a developer of Ethernet SAN solutions, announced Coraid EtherDrive SAN Manager 1.5, Coraid's newest management platform.

Coraid® Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, announced Coraid EtherDrive® SAN Manager (ESM) 1.5, Coraid’s newest management platform, which provides integration with VMware vCentre Server and Microsoft VSS and pools storage resources for simplified storage operations.  Coraid’s groundbreaking Ethernet SAN platform eliminates multiple layers of traditional SAN complexity, and ESM enables powerful automation in virtualised and cloud computing environments. 

Californian Ethernet SAN providers, Coraid, yesterday announced the release of Coraid EtherDrive SAN Manager (ESM) 1.5, Coraid’s newest management platform, which provides integration with VMware vCentre Server and Microsoft VSS, and pools storage resources for simplified cloud and virtualization storage operations.

Coraid, Inc., a developer of Ethernet-based SANs (storage area networks) that has roots in the Linux environment, is introducing two new products that should provide significant cost and performance benefits, says CEO Kevin Brown. “There is a 5-8x price-performance advantage and power and space savings are over and above that.”

Coraid Inc., a developer of Ethernet SAN offerings, announced Monday that Barryhund Administrators Inc. has selected Coraid EtherDrive for their Ethernet SAN storage.

Kevin Brown, CEO for US data storage provider and leading Ethernet SAN developer Coraid, explains why data storage and new cloud computing infrastructures are often being built on an old-fashioned Fibre Channel. Time to upgrade to gain the full benefit of the cloud?

With an aim toward building world class storage solution, a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions, Coraid Inc., has created a Customer Advisory Council, which will be represented by top executives from industry-leading companies in a wide variety of markets. The Council is expected to help the company accomplish this goal through development guidelines.

Coraid has announced the formation of its Customer Advisory Council. Members of the council represent top executives from industry-leading companies in a wide variety of markets including Shutterstock, Legg Mason Capital Management, Exegy, Inc., Pac-West Telecomm, Thought Equity Motion, Smartronix, and Northrop Grumman Corporation. The Customer Advisory Council will work closely with Coraid's executive team to forecast future data centre requirements; identify emerging trends in the cloud, virtualisation, and storage markets; and develop and refine product roadmaps.

Coraid, Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers worldwide, announced that ParkingSOFT, in parking products and applications, has selected Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet SAN storage for their virtualization project.

Essex sixth-form institution Palmer’s College has deployed Coraid ATA over Ethernet SAN storage as part of a data centre virtualisation project.

In 2010 the college was offered an interest-free government loan toward its IT infrastructure, so it decided to virtualise its data centre to save power and cooling as it had maxed out the available capacity.

Coraid, a developer of Ethernet storage area network (SAN) solutions, announced that ParkingSOFT, a provider of parking products and applications, selected Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet SAN storage for its virtualization project.

Storage data communication has become too complicated and expensive. So I love it when I see a technology that genuinely reduces complexity-and saves money-without an obvious performance downside. I am sure cash-strapped small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular would concur.

Coraid Inc., announced that Duplo International has deployed Coraid EtherDrive technology to build a shared storage solution for a Microsoft Hyper-V environment.

The result is an Ethernet-based, enterprise-level SAN that out-performs any Fibre Channel and iSCSI alternatives, at a fraction of the cost. 

Coraid used to be a downmarket beast, selling its Ethernet storage wares off a barrow on the street - now it's got shiny new management and has new aspirations. Can it make the transition and become a creature to be reckoned with?

Ethernet SAN vendor Coraid claims that scores of VARs have been left high and dry by the recent run of acquisitions in the storage channel.

Coraid marked the start of its EMEA expansion plans earlier this week with the rollout of its first channel programme, which already counts VARs Bell Microsystems and S3 as members.

A couple of days ago I was in an interesting call with two executives from Coraid: Kevin Brown (CEO) and his colleague Marcos Burnett (EMEA sales director). The following story is a resume of that call and a first introduction to Coraid technology and products.

"Many of these companies are seen as the next generation in data storage," said Paul Bard, research director of the Global IPO Fund of Renaissance Capital.
He says the smaller players have a flexibility advantage over EMC and others.
"The big legacy storage vendors want to embrace the new technology," Bard said, "but that requires a big overhaul of their architecture, and they don't want to cannibalize existing products."

The following vendors are at the forefront of tackling the various challenges of data storage and management – from assisting small and medium-sized businesses to enabling management of the largest corpora of data to date. In alphabetical order, here are 7 emerging cloud storage vendors who could help you get a handle on your data headaches.