Canada’s RackForce Joins Forces With Coraid

Coraid, Inc. has partnered with RackForce Networks Inc., Canada’s enterprise cloud provider.

A major challenge when building an enterprise cloud solution is the multi-tenancy required to manage multiple workloads with varying performance and capacity requirements. Coraid’s expertise in solving this and other challenges faced by cloud providers has saved RackForce more than $1 million in combined CAPEX and OPEX costs. Coraid’s ability to support just-in-time scaling has helped the company grow its cloud business to more than 2PB of storage representing hundreds of Canadian enterprise customers.

“With legacy storage vendors what we constantly ran into is what I refer to as ‘marketecture’,” said Tim Dufour, co-founder and CEO, RackForce. “A sales guy would come in and quote us performance and capacity numbers based on an enterprise environment. Since we deal with hundreds of enterprises, we have a complexity much higher than you’d see in the typical enterprise. We constantly found that while the physical capacity was there, if we were to maximize it, performance would suffer.“

RackForce began to realize that of the three pillars of the data center – network, compute and storage – storage held the key to differentiation in the IaaS market. The network and compute layers have been figured out, but there was not a storage solution built with cloud providers in mind. As a cloud service provider, RackForce is dedicated to delivering a flexible storage solution that is customized for its customers’ needs.

Selecting a vendor to play such a critical role in the success of its business was not easy. During the selection process, it became clear to the RackForce team that Coraid was the only vendor that provided a solution designed to meet the needs of RackForce’s business model. Coraid’s architecture simplifies the management of data growth and dynamic workloads, making it for RackForce’s multi-petabyte cloud environment.

RackForce also needed a trusted partner. The company was experiencing 50% year-over-year storage growth, and was able to work with Coraid’s experienced cloud architects to design a system that fits its specific needs and supports RackForce’s rapid expansion. RackForce’s Fortune 100 customers experience the benefit of this partnership when placing their mission-critical workloads in the cloud. These databases and ecommerce workloads require performance, availability and resiliency. The hybrid storage platform powered by Coraid delivers that for both RackForce and its enterprise customers.

“Public cloud service providers have a very different set of challenges than traditional data centers and therefore have a very different set of requirements for their storage vendor,” said Dave Kresse, CEO, Coraid. “These challenges include rapid and unpredictable growth of large data sets; the need to support mixed workloads and address performance, availability and resiliency on a per-workload basis; and the need for manageability and visibility capabilities that accelerate the CSP’s business. Coraid is focused on addressing these unique challenges with our solution and committed to partnering with our customers to ensure their business success.“