Coraid Reveals Clustered Storage Virtualization Appliance

Coraid, the developer of the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage protocol, today announced the introduction of their new EtherDrive VS21 VirtualStorage Appliance. Demonstrating at VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas, the VS21 appliance takes array based virtualization out of the RAID box and puts it on the storage network, enabling ESX server environments to manage an unlimited amount of EtherDrive AoE storage. Combining fast AoE storage with Logical Volume Management allows users to adjust their storage pool quickly and easily as usage patterns change.

VS21 VirtualStorage takes full advantage of the simplicity of the AoE protocol to perform fast AoE frame redirection in a hardware appliance that sits on the SAN without creating a performance bottleneck or failure points. This approach creates a very fast storage virtualization with dynamically resizable logical unit numbers (LUNs) that can span across many EtherDrive storage appliances. The VS21 also provides volume replication, mirroring and snap shots, making it ideally suited for server virtualization environments.

"With the EtherDrive VS21, Coraid is making scalable storage even simpler to use. The VS21 is the most affordable SAN storage virtualization appliance available today," said James Kemp, CEO of Coraid. "EtherDrive storage users can now create resilient SANs with not a single point of failure."

Logical Volume Management is storage virtualization that is filesystem independent and improves storage utilization by making a virtual pool of physical storage easy to allocate for any application across multiple OS platforms. Key features of the new EtherDrive VS21 include active-active clustering of VS21s so that users can just add additional VS21s to the SAN to scale speed and increase reliability. Each VS21 learns the LUN configuration by reading metadata from Coraid SAN storage, simplifying cluster operation. When more than 255 LUNs are required, multiple VS21 clusters can be added to an AoE SAN to scale out the number of LUNs. The VS21 appliance also allows users to synchronously mirror (RAID1) physical LUNs located in multiple RAID storage units, creating no single point of failure storage systems.

Coraid’s AoE storage products use standard Ethernet combined with the open AoE storage protocol to deliver the fastest, lowest cost and most scalable networked storage available. AoE eliminates the complexities and high costs typically associated with iSCSI or Fibre Channel systems by removing the need for expensive ToE (TCP/IP off-load Engine) cards or HBAs (Host Bus Adapters). Instead, AoE allows multiple disks to be shared on a network to create highly scalable virtualized storage system at the lowest possible price.

Coraid’s EtherDrive VS21 is available now and has a list price of $2,995 and comes with redundant hot swap power supplies.

For more information about Coraid’s free AoE initiator for VMware’s ESX hypervisor