Coraid Supports 4TB HDDs

Coraid
Inc. announced support for 4TB drives for its EtherDriveR
SRX storage solutions.

These drives allow the company to
deliver storage density of up to 1.4PB per rack, an increase of 33%
over previous configurations, enabling data centres to optimise costs
relating to space, power and cooling. Customers can take advantage of
the ability to mix and match drive types in every array to combine
the performance of SSD flash drives with the capacity and low cost of
4TB SATA.

Given the growth of storage demand
across all market segments, improved storage density and operating
costs have become important. The 4TB drive offering delivers savings,
including power efficiency of up to 25% per terabyte, which addresses a
cost and scaling constraint in many data centres today.

"Growing storage demand and
requirements for business agility have become a major business
challenge for anyone building public and private cloud
infrastructure," said Doug Dooley, VP of product management
at Coraid. "By combining the increased density of 4TB drives
with our high-performance scale-out architecture, Coraid enables
customers to process cloud-scale data without trading off the
performance or resilience of traditional enterprise storage
solutions. The use of 4TB drives will also provide substantial
savings on rack space, cooling and power, further increasing the
value of our new offering."

The block storage solutions offer
building blocks for cloud-scale storage deployments. EtherDrive
leverages a parallel, connectionless storage networking fabric and
software intelligence to aggregate commodity hardware resources and
manage them as a pooled resource.

EtherDrive offers flexibility in how
storage infrastructure is deployed. The scale-out architecture
enables administrators to grow incrementally by adding drives or
arrays, without the need for large up-front purchases or forklift
upgrades.

This makes deploying shared storage as
simple as managing a local disk – just plug it in and go. All the
capacity of a large RAID set appears to the file system or
application as a direct attached disk, with Ethernet as the
backplane. This capability, called VDAS, brings the simplicity of DAS
and the and resiliency of networked storage.

Adding capacity requires plugging in a
new appliance, so capacity grows linearly with requirements, without
the forklift upgrades or upfront expenses for controller-based
architectures. A parallel architecture allows bandwidth to increase
linearly with the number of network connections, while providing
network redundancy, without the need to configure additional
multi-pathing software. Storage automation and one-click provisioning
capabilities in EtherCloud simplify the management of storage.