Coraid Sold EtherDrive Arrays to 20 Colleges and Universities

CORAID Inc. announced sales of EtherDrive storage arrays to more than 20 higher education customers around the world so far in 2010.

Institutions adopting CORAID EtherDrive in 2010 include Rice University, Baylor College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, University of North Carolina, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Dublin, Lund University, University of French Polynesia, University de Jaén, Wake Technical Community College, St. Louis University, Florida A&M, Washington University, York University, The Sixth Form College, Australia Maritime College, Palmer’s College, and Shanxi University.

Starting at under $500 per terabyte and scaling to multiple petabytes, CORAID’s Ethernet SAN solutions deliver a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI solutions, while eliminating layers of complex SAN management. For higher education organizations struggling with tighter budgets and an ever-increasing need for high performance data storage, EtherDrive delivers a unique solution.

CORAID’s university and college customers are using EtherDrive storage solutions to support data-intensive programs such as genome sequencing, physics research, medical center operations, and cancer research, requiring massive scalability and performance. Rice University has deployed CORAID EtherDrive storage appliances to support a variety of research computing requirements, and is currently planning a centralized "storage cloud" in their state-of-the-art 12,000 square foot data center.

"CORAID EtherDrive provides an ideal mix of flexibility and high performance, which is crucial for supporting research groups across the campus," said Dr. B. Kim Andrews, manager of research computing at Rice University. "We are passionate about supporting the work of our researchers. As we move to our new university-wide cloud architecture, CORAID’s platform delivers high performance and storage economics that allow us to say yes to more projects."

"CORAID is proud to support the important research and teaching missions of our higher education customers worldwide," said Carl Wright, executive vice president of sales and product management at CORAID. "Cutting-edge research requires powerful storage infrastructure that can be easily reconfigured on-the-fly. Our EtherDrive platform leverages the simplicity of Ethernet to eliminate complex storage topologies and enable industry-leading price performance."

Ethernet SAN solutions provide organizations of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance, scale-out storage. CORAID’s EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market. Using software with off-the-shelf hardware and raw Ethernet, EtherDrive storage arrays enable a scale-out storage architecture that is suited to dynamic virtualization and cloud environments.