Coraid Blog

Brantley Coile, Coraid CTO, to Speak at OpenSource World

Brantley Coile, CTO of Coraid and inventor of the ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol will be speaking at OpenSource World™ (formerly LinuxWorld®), scheduled to be held August 12-13, at Moscone Center West in San Francisco. The inventor of AoE lightweight SAN protocol will discuss how the technology has commoditized Open Storage.  OpenSource World focuses on innovative solutions in real-world environments using open source, open standards and open architecture as part of an integrated IT infrastructure. Coile’s session, “AoE: A Standard Protocol Has Commoditized Storage” will be held Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 2 PM.

The talk provides an insider's view of the popular open source AoE (ATA over Ethernet) protocol, highlighting its applicability in virtualization. Offering significant cost and performance benefits over traditional NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel for server virtualization environments, AoE delivers on speed. This talk will explore the openness of the technology and how that development paradigm helped the technology evolve to its pervasiveness, extending to virtualization today. Case study examples will be shown  that explore how AoE storage achieves extremely high performance at a significantly lower cost that iSCSI or Fibre Channel solutions in Xen, Citrix, and VMware virtualization environments.

Coraid + VMware Storage Virtualization Make the Grade in Ohio

We have a number of joint customers with VMware and the City of North Canton Schools in Ohio is a great example of that (link words "great example" to full case study NCantonCaseStudy.pdf). The school district, like most local governments this year, is facing some budget challenges. AoE-based EtherDrive storage provided a for fast and affordable storage.

SearchStorage's Todd Erickson has the story here (LINK TO Full Story). He talks to storage administrator John Fano about the Ohio school's move to AoE-based EtherDrive storage from Coraid. Fano goes through experiences setting up the system to details on how they use EtherDrive storage system and VMware for the district's file services, and how data growth already has the district expanding the storage in a simple manner.

What is Canton using?

"... two Coraid Inc. EtherDrive SR1521 storage appliances, one EtherDrive VS21 virtual storage appliance, and five EtherDrive SAN HBA 2 Gbps PCI-E cards. Each EtherDrive SR1521 shelf has 15 7,200 rpm 250 GB SATA disks chunked into RAID 5 arrays...."

Read the entire article here:  Full Story.