Suse Incorporates Coraid Drivers

Coraid Inc. has contributed major updates to the open-source software initiator for ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) in the Linux kernel.

The software driver allows any Linux server to serve as a host for an AoE-based storage target with no additional installation required. The latest changes, which deliver a significant boost in storage performance, scalability and stability, were committed to the Linux kernel through kernel.org operated by the Linux Kernel Organization.

SUSE LINUX Products GmbH is the first Linux provider to incorporate the latest updates into their distribution. It also integrated the OpenStack Cinder drivers for AoE and Coraid EtherCloud that Coraid recently contributed to the Grizzly release of OpenStack. These drivers will allow public, private and hybrid OpenStack-based clouds to integrate with EtherDrive and EtherCloud platforms to deliver scalable, automated storage services.

Coraid started out in the Linux and HPC markets, and contributed its first AoE driver to the Linux kernel in 2005. AoE provides a massively parallel, connectionless data fabric between servers and storage, and Coraid’s Virtual DAS (VDAS) driver technology virtualizes all shared storage to appear as local drives. By virtually eliminating the management complexity that exists in today’s FC and iSCSI environments while providing low-latency, high-throughput data access, AoE offers simplicity, scalability and flexibility in virtualized and cloud environments.

"Linux and OpenStack have become the platforms of choice for many cloud builders today," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "The connectionless architecture of Ethernet SAN technology is an ideal match for cloud environments that require on-demand scalability and flexibility in the infrastructure. With this update, cloud builders can use the software driver in the Linux kernel to deploy clouds using Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet storage."

"SUSE and Coraid both believe in the power of open-source platforms such as Linux and OpenStack in building scalable elastic private and public clouds. We are committed to creating an easy-to-deploy and manage cloud infrastructure solution," said Michael Miller, VP of global alliances and marketing, SUSE. "We incorporated the latest updates from Coraid to allow our mutual customers to gain the full benefit of Ethernet storage."

The new AoE driver is available in the Linux kernel version 3.8. Coraid is also working with other Linux distributions to accelerate availability of the driver in these distributions that are widely used in the enterprise market. The OpenStack drivers will be available in the next SUSE cloud release in Q4, 2013.