Coraid Upgrades Firmware to Add RAID-6

CORAID, Inc. announced the immediate availability of a firmware upgrade that introduces RAID 6 support for EtherDrive SAN. Double Parity RAID, or RAID 6, safeguards against data loss by allowing an array to keep working with no lost data even if two disks fail. A second set of parity is calculated and distributed across all the drives, providing significantly more robust fault tolerance.

"RAID6 eliminates the risk of data loss if a second hard disk drive fails or an unrecoverable read error occurs while the RAID array is rebuilding," said James Kemp, CEO of CORAID. "Because our EtherDrive SAN solutions are so extremely affordable, customers can have a completely redundant, fault tolerant SAN at a fraction of the cost of a comparable iSCSI or FibreChannel solution." Built for virtualization environments, EtherDrive SAN provides fault tolerant network storage that is very complimentary to a VMware Infrastructure solution.

CORAID EtherDrive SAN is a scalable network storage solution that fits SMB budgets. Delivering Fibre Channel speeds at Ethernet prices, EtherDrive SAN is affordably fast, simple to understand and easy to use. Built on the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) lightweight SAN protocol, EtherDrive provides enterprise-class storage that embraces virtualization for the demands of today’s IT organizations.

Last month CORAID released results of a performance comparison study of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) running in a VMware ESX environment. Results show that AoE is substantially faster than Fibre Channel and iSCSI in testing both read and write throughput.