A recent Coraid Survey suggests that the high cost of storage purchases is diluting the benefits of server virtualization. More than half of IT respondents reported that for their virtualization project they spent 3 times more on new storage than on their virtualization software. The high cost of storage is one reason our customers turn to Coraid because Ethernet SAN offers a simpler storage topology with better performance at a lower cost than traditional storage arrays.
A new customer deployment at Duplo International really illustrated this well. Duplo decided to use Microsoft Hyper-V to virtualize their servers in order to increase utilization. Here is what Glyn Nutting, the Financial Director at Duplo said, “we knew that server virtualization would help us reduce our IT spend. However it would require a shared storage environment and our concern was that this would be so expensive that it would negate our server consolidation savings.”
Duplo was pretty methodical in reviewing all the storage options available to them. They liked Fibre Channel for the performance, but found it too expensive and complex, and they were not prepared to sacrifice performance by deploying an iSCSI solution. Instead Duplo turned to Ethernet SAN technology which leverages Layer-2 Ethernet to provide a high-performance, scalable architecture built with off-the-shelf, affordable hardware. Duplo initially looked at Coraid because of the low TCO but were then blown away by the performance and the simplicity.
Why do customers find Ethernet SAN so simple? Because Ethernet is a technology they know well. With Ethernet SAN storage customers can set up an array in 60 seconds; three commands; it's done. After that it's self-service in the hypervisor. Shared storage is configured as if its local storage, special multi-pathing software goes away, port zoning and bonding go away. The whole idea of a fixed connection network goes away. Ethernet SAN strips away the complexity of legacy storage networks.
We hear these stories all the time. Traditional storage arrays are too complex and too expensive. They were designed for the mainframe era and do not scale well under the unique demands of virtual infrastructures. By partnering with Coraid and leveraging Ethernet Duplo got an easy to use, high performance and affordable shared storage solution.
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