ELEVEN START-UPS BOOMING IN 2012: Coraid …

Coraid Inc. announced another year of momentum, with sales doubling over the past year and growing by a factor of 12 in the last three years.

It solutions have been deployed by more than 1,700 customers worldwide, spanning industries including manufacturing, finance, healthcare, education, public cloud service providers, federal, state and local governments, and defense.

Coraid offers a range of block, file and storage management and automation products that deliver elasticity and simplicity at scale using a new generation of Ethernet-based storage networking. Coraid EtherDrive storage arrays feature a scale-out architecture that uses commodity hardware and a distributed OS to pool storage resources into a single logical system.

In 2012, the company unveiled its EtherCloud platform for software-defined storage. Built on technology from the companys acquisition of Yunteq in late 2011, EtherCloud enhances business agility in the data centre by simplifying delivery of scale-out infrastructure.

"We have seen radical shifts in compute and networking infrastructure in the past few years away from monolithic, hardware-focused architectures to software-defined scale-out resources that are managed and controlled entirely through software," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "It is now time for this transformation to come to storage as well."

While other vendors talking about software-defined storage are still in the vision and planning stages and have limited customer adoption, EtherCloud has been deployed by more than 50 customers across the world.

EtherCloud offers a set of features including:

• Pools of storage that can be created and grown on demand
• Multi-tenancy integration with LDAP/AD for authentication
• One-click instantiation of VMware ESXi virtual machines, integrated with storage allocation and networking connectivity
• Metering of compute, network and storage use
• The ability to integrate with open networking and cloud frameworks, as well as with a variety of industry-standard file systems

"As cloud architectures become more prevalent, Ethernet-based storage will continue to grow share and dominate the market," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director for the storage software practice at IDC. "This means that Ethernet and IP- based storage services will continue to gain adoption in the market. Suppliers like Coraid with mature software-defined storage and networking offerings on scale-out hardware will no doubt have an edge over the incumbents that have largely focused on FC solutions."

At the August 2012 VMworld conference in San Francisco, Coraid garnered attention with the first demonstration of software-defined storage integrating with software-defined networking solutions from Nicira, Big Switch and Arista. Following the show, The Wall Street Journal named Coraid a Top 50 Startup, and Bloomberg Businessweek cited the company as a Hot Enterprise Startup.

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