OpenStack Incorporates Coraid Drivers

Coraid
Inc. has contributed drivers for
ATA-over-Ethernet and Coraid EtherCloud to
OpenStack Block Storage.

The AoE driver
enables storage access over connectionless, massively parallel 10GbE,
providing superior performance versus legacy storage networking.
These drivers will allow public, private and hybrid OpenStack-based
clouds to integrate with Coraid’s EtherDrive and EtherCloud platforms
to deliver automated storage services. Coraid also announced that it
has joined the OpenStack community as a corporate sponsor.

OpenStack has
emerged as a popular IaaS platform for cloud builders who are
designing automated software-defined architectures. Coraid has an
history of collaboration with the open-source community, and worked
with longtime partner Alyseo to develop the OpenStack Block Storage
integration. Coraid is the first commercial storage platform to
combine scale-out enterprise block storage with a policy engine for
automated storage management, providing ideal building blocks for
modern data centers.

"Coraid has
a long history of commitment to open source, starting with the
contribution of the ATA-over-Ethernet driver to the Linux kernel in
2005," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "Coraid’s
contribution to OpenStack Block Storage enables enterprises and
service providers to build open-source clouds while leveraging
Coraid’s elastic, scale-out storage and automation platforms to
deliver simplicity at scale."

Coraid’s drivers
integrate with OpenStack block storage allowing end users to
provision and manage volumes on EtherDrive storage. The integration
leverages the REST APIs provided by EtherCloud that expose every
aspect of storage provisioning and management to programmatic
control. EtherCloud also provides a policy engine and framework that
enable one-click provisioning of enterprise storage, simplifying
capacity and performance management. This allows IT administrators
and end users to reduce infrastructure-provisioning times from weeks
to minutes. Using EtherCloud, administrators can deliver underlying
block storage as services that automatically create volumes with
specific performance and availability characteristics, including
flash acceleration and no-single-point-of-failure configurations.

"OpenStack
is the leading open source platform for building public and private
clouds," said Mark Collier, COO at OpenStack Foundation.
"Coraid’s contribution of the AoE driver to OpenStack
leverages OpenStack’s pluggable architecture to enable users to
choose the best technologies to fit their business needs. As a
Foundation sponsor, Coraid is supporting our efforts to make open
source solutions for cloud building more attractive to enterprises
and service providers."

The drivers are
expected for availability in the next release of OpenStack
codenamed Grizzly that is scheduled for release in April 2013.

Coraid will demonstrate EtherDrive storage at the OpenStack Summit in
Portland in April 2013.