CORAID is committed to providing very high performance at the most affordable price. The EtherDrive Host Bus Adapter is a doorway for many users to enjoy the benefits of a storage area network affordably for the first time in conjunction with VMware's ESX virtual environment capabilities. The EtherDrive HBA allows ESX users to use EtherDrive SAN storage and is very inexpensive. Network storage can now be virtually assigned and managed for maximum utilization with the combined power of VMware ESX and CORAID's EtherDrive SAN.
Disk capacity used to be very limited, therefore allowing all disks to remain part of the server. Once hard drive capacity and speed increased there was no longer room for hard drives on a single server. Additionally, more applications and users began to require more and more access to the same data, so the data had to become available in a centralized, more easily managed method. Speed and the ability to scale capacity became more and more important as the need and availability of centralized data became mission critical.
At the time, the available networking technologies, including Ethernet, were not capable of the high throughput required to make network storage a reality. The problem was viewed as more of a storage problem, however, and not a network dilemma. Fibre Channel, originally designed for simplifying connections and increasing distances, was co-opted as the solution to provide the speed and reliability required to make network storage a reality. Fibre Channel evolved into a rebuild of all network layers from the ground up. This makes Fibre Channel hardware more complex and proprietary. This combined with the fact only relatively small volumes of Fibre Channel hardware are sold, makes Fibre Channel very expensive to own and manage with no hope of it becoming affordable at commodity prices.
Another unfortunate drawback of Fibre Channel (iSCSI too) is that it is connection based, meaning two well defined end points must be configured and managed tightly. Although connection based protocols are secure, reliable and can have decent speed, they do not really allow for leveraging the existing network infrastructure. With ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), increasing the overall speed and throughput is accomplished simply by adding another host bus adapter to get more overall speed and throughput. Without increased (scaled) network capacity it is impossible to grow storage capacity seamlessly and without exorbitant costs. Another very real issue is how different applications, users and systems need access to network storage in demanding and often times unseen ways. Storage needs grow in a linear fashion with capacity planning being straight forward. Access to network storage, the myriad of network connections and paths used to get to the data, grows in a non-linear manner with high demand and full utilization of the network. Hence, network storage is really a networking challenge, not a storage challenge.
For information on CORAID EtherDrive SAN visit www.coraid.com
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