Two Coraid Scale-Out EtherDrive at Boston Emerson College

Coraid, Inc. announced that Emerson
College has selected its
EtherDrive SRX storage arrays to provide the shared storage for its VMware
virtualized server environment.

Emerson College, located in the heart of Boston, MA, is the nation’s premiere
institution of higher education devoted to communication and the arts in a
liberal arts context.

Like most education institutions, Emerson College is very cost
conscious. Andrew Feland, director of IT, and Frankie Frain, manager of
networks and systems, wanted to consolidate physical servers using VMware
server-virtualization technology to reduce cost and improve efficiency. They
also needed to replace an ageing and expensive-to-maintain FC SAN.

Frain understood that the benefits realized through server virtualization would
be offset by their existing complex, expensive storage, so he developed a clear
vision to restructure the company’s infrastructure. He knew he had to find a
new shared-storage array that would be affordable, easy to use and reliable,
and that would offer performance.

The team was in search of a system that would lower their support cost and
provide a flexible, scale-out system that could meet different performance
needs. The college looked at solutions from major storage vendors but found
them to be complex, expensive and not as flexible as Frain required.

To fulfill its requirements, Emerson deployed two Coraid EtherDrive SRX storage
arrays. These arrays that provide storage
over Ethernet, allowing IT administrators to respond to complex storage needs quickly
and reliably. The array is designed for performance,
scalability and simplicity. EtherDrive SRX block-storage arrays enable a scale-out Ethernet SAN architecture that is suited to virtualization, cloud and big data environments.

"Coraid EtherDrive provides an ideal
mix of flexibility and high performance, which is crucial for supporting our
faculty and students across the campus," said Feland. "We are passionate about supporting the work
of our users. As we look ahead to implementing university-wide cloud
architecture, Coraid’s platform delivers the performance and storage economics
that allow us to approve more projects."

Coraid’s Ethernet Block Storage offered a flexible, simple, modular storage
platform that did not require any training and could be installed in one day.
Unlike FC infrastructures, Coraid’s solution did not have to be configured or
reconfigured, and it enabled Emerson to work within its existing VMware and OS
environment. The storage looks like local storage to VMware servers,
thus making it easier for users to log in and control their storage. And
because EtherDrive SRX is simple and easy to implement, it eliminates the
many steps required by complex storage configuration.