Publishing Firm Agora Overcomes Storage Bottlenecks

Coraid,
Inc., a developer of Ethernet storage solutions, announced that Agora
Publishing, an holding company for various publishers of
financial, health, travel, and special interest books and newsletters, has
built greater scalability, reliability and operational efficiency into its
virtualization infrastructure by deploying Coraid EtherFlash, a scale-out,
all-flash Ethernet storage solution.

Agora Publishing has 24 affiliates and
subsidiaries located in eight different countries. As a global publishing
house, it is faced with management and TCO challenges
associated with its growing volume of electronic data. To address these challenges, the company moved away from its previous legacy scale-up
storage infrastructure to a 10GbE storage solution that uses
EtherFlash, a modular, scale-out, all-flash storage appliance based on SSDs.

"We
needed a better way to manage our data," said Jason Pell, CIO for
Agora Publishing. "Coraid provided
us with a solution that better positions my team to meet the company’s evolving
storage needs. The combination of Coraid scale-out flash storage and Ethernet
helped us deliver on a number of operational goals such as improved
performance, scalability and reliability."

EtherFlash is a storage solution
bundle that combines SSDs with the massively
parallel scale-out architecture of Coraid EtherDrive to provide
performance for I/O-intensive applications. EtherDrive block storage
solutions offer flexible building blocks for cloud-scale storage deployments. It leverages a connectionless layer-2 storage networking fabric and
software intelligence to aggregate commodity hardware resources and manage them
as a pooled resource.

EtherDrive offers customers the
flexibility to deploy any mix of SSD, SAS and SATA drives in a single array,
based on their evolving requirements, and to add appliances to expand capacity
and performance. For example, a high-end Web application could leverage 24 or
36 SSDs in a single array, while a VDI environment might combine 6 SSDs for
shared boot images with 30 SATA drives for high-capacity file storage.
EtherDrive also provides the ability to accelerate I/O performance with
customizable flash-based caching.

Applications like databases, email and analytics require high number of IO/s; meeting these requirements with spinning media such as SAS
or SATA disk drives is often prohibitively expensive. A typical 15K SAS drive
provides approximately 200 IO/s, while a SSD is orders of magnitude faster
flash storage delivers outstanding performance, greater reliability and power savings while providing the highest IO/s per
dollar.