Coraid and Pluribus Networks Partnering

Coraid, Inc. and Pluribus Networks, Inc., in hardware-accelerated network virtualization for private and public
cloud datacenters, announced a partnership to build a storage network solution
that delivers enhanced end-to-end security, dynamic flexibility and
simplicity.

The solution will leverage the Pluribus Netvisor Software-Defined Fabric to
combine network infrastructure with Coraid EtherDrive and EtherCloud, enabling
customers to build flexible software-defined data centers that can be
programmed to deliver new services.

The Pluribus Networks network hypervisor technology transforms software-defined
storage network scalability by providing network service-level abstractions for
large-scale multi-tenancy, powered by distributed fabric intelligence. With
multi-million flow processing, always-on traffic analytics and lossless, high
bandwidth, low latency classes, software-defined storage is guaranteed the
network resources it demands in a virtualized fabric.

EtherDrive scale-out storage platform uses connectionless, standard layer 2 Ethernet as a converged network infrastructure, enabling elasticity,
geographic distribution and parallel performance. EtherCloud automation platform allows enterprise and cloud customers to serve
up underlying storage capacity as flexible storage cloud services with
one-click, self-service storage provisioning.

The combined Pluribus-Coraid solution allows administrators to define
network flows that control storage traffic from the host down to the storage
systems. These flows enable network traffic isolation in a multi-tenant
environment for security, QoS, and resource management. The Pluribus network
hypervisor with its vFlow capability makes storage aware of traffic patterns
and hotspots in the storage network.

Additional benefits of interoperability
of Network Hypervisor

with EtherDrive/EtherCloud include:

• Ability to scale and deploy Software-Defined Storage Networks in
  private and public cloud environments;
• The network hypervisor natively understands Coraid’s ATA over Ethernet
  (AoE) traffic and optimizes for storage-class QoS, such as parsing shelf
  / slot attributes in the AoE header;
• Built-in, always-on network and storage connection-based analytics, deep-packet
  inspection and logging;
• Control an entire network of switches, compared to conventional overlay SDN
  solutions that interact only with hypervisors or network edge switches.

"The modern datacenter is going
through the biggest transformation it has seen in more than a decade,"
said Anil Virmani, SVP of engineering, Coraid. "Computing has already made the transition with the advent of scale-out
servers and server virtualization. We are now seeing a similar shift in
networks and storage, away from manually-configured scale-up designs to
software-defined, scale-out infrastructure that is better suited to modern
applications and IT provisioning models."

In the newly evolved virtualized IT infrastructure, any application on any
server must have access to any data location or storage array to be agile and
flexible. There are important classes of applications requiring deterministic,
low latency and/or high bandwidth access to data. For many of these
applications, which include database, data mining, high transactions, media
feeds, virtual desktops, requirements are not being fulfilled resulting in
these applications not being scalable or agile as needed. There is a need
to virtualize the paths or networks between applications and their data.

"Pluribus and Coraid’s
best-in-class network and storage technologies dovetail to provide the optimal
networked storage solution for the software defined datacenter – a software-defined
storage network as a programmable and extensible infrastructure that responds
instantly to changes in business, end-user requirements and market demands,"
said Robert Drost, co-founder and CEO, Pluribus. "First, the Pluribus Software-Defined Fabric
provides massive ability to isolate, guarantee bandwidth and latency, and
analyze Coraid’s storage classes. Next, we support Coraid’s ground-breaking AoE
protocol natively with flow-aware mapping of storage traffic between Pluribus
VNETs and Coraid AoE initiators and targets. This translates to true SLAs for
Platinum, Gold, and Silver-class QoS on a shared infrastructure-ultra-high-end
enterprise SAN SLAs will finally be available at a much lower TCO to all."

The Pluribus Networks Netvisor solution is available to customers on the
Pluribus Networks F64 Series Intelligent Top-of-Rack (iTOR) Server-Switch
platform and select ODM ‘white-box’ switches sourced directly
from original design manufacturers.