Coraid ZX4000 File Storage Appliance

Coraid, Inc. announced the availability of its latest and fastest file storage appliance – the ZX4000.

It delivers flash-enhanced performance to handle large-scale mixed workloads in both enterprise and cloud deployments. The architecture of the ZX solution allows customers to create a potentially limitless pool of elastic, shared, block storage and to scale file storage performance by adding more ZX appliances.

The ZX4000 can be deployed in a resilient architecture that offers protection against up to three shelf or drive failures while retaining high storage efficiencies of around 80%. This enterprise storage solution is available at a cost comparable to consumer-grade public cloud services and at a fraction of the cost of legacy NAS storage.

Many of Coraid’s enterprise and service provider customers are experiencing growth and highly variable workloads in a shared storage environment. They collaborated with Coraid to design an appliance that can be configured to handle a dynamic mix of workloads, capacities and throughput in multitenant use cases.

"Public cloud scalability, economics and resilience models are setting a new agenda for IT," said Coraid CEO Kevin Brown. "By combining enterprise storage features with a scale-out architecture, the ZX4000 provides an unmatched storage building block for cloud deployments."

Since its introduction in 2012, the ZX product line has been deployed by customers in applications including backup, public and private clouds, and media. The ZX is file storage appliance based on the Zettabyte File System and designed to work with Coraid EtherDrive SRX block storage. ZX leverages the open storage architecture of EtherDrive to bring together two systems – a high-performance enterprise file system and Ethernet block storage – to offer power and flexibility.

Traditional NAS systems typically utilize multi-copy replication with complex mirroring to protect against three component failures. In contrast, the ZX’s resilient, cloud-compatible architecture uses RAIN and RAIDZ-3 options to protect against the failure of three entire shelves or drives while maintaining high storage efficiency of around 80%. Furthermore, rapid RAID rebuild capabilities ensure that drive failures do not incur prolonged system performance degradation.

Drives behind a legacy NAS controller can be used only by controllers in a single string, creating an architecture with storage silos. Using EtherDrive scale-out block storage, customers can create a shared storage pool that is potentially limitless in size. As more capacity or performance is needed, customers can add more SRX or ZX appliances and reallocate storage on the fly without hardware reconfiguration. Coraid’s Ethernet backbone allows users to deploy new capacity anywhere on the Ethernet network, whether in a different rack, different building or different city – overcoming the distance limitations of legacy architectures. These options enable the construction of tuned cloud storage solutions based on the ZX family.

The ZX4000 is available from Coraid and from authorized resellers.