Our announcement with Arista Networks to team up to accelerate the adoption of Ethernet SAN received plenty of media interest with a number of articles published in the press already. Interest is high within IT organizations and with the media and analysts for an alternative to the legacy storage protocols (Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI) that can meet the demands of modern, virtualized data centers.
Server virtualization features like live migration strain legacy storage networks that were designed for static, mainframe deployments. This makes management difficult and drags down the ROI of virtualization and cloud projects. Our shared goal with Arista is to enable extensive virtualization based on end-to-end Ethernet, flexible topologies, and low cost scale out hardware without compromising on performance.
In fact, by eliminating complex protocol layers Coraid EtherDrive storage enables near-bare-metal performance using Arista's ultra-low-latency 10GbE switches. To demonstrate this, we tested performance using the IOMETER workload generator via simulated application workloads based on streaming media services. The tests confirm Arista and Coraid’s ability to deliver predictably scalable performance of 1,800 MB/sec from 36 SATA drives. Put into perspective, a single shelf was able to drive enough bandwidth to saturate a 10Gbps interface. And with the deep buffers of the Arista 7500 family of switches featuring more than 40ms of per port packet buffering, conditions such as fan-in, which arise when multiple servers need to access the same storage data, are well handled.
If you are considering storage for a server virtualization or cloud project, Coraid and Arista can provide a high performance solution with the simplicity and cost of scale out hardware.
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