New SAN Virtualization Appliance

Virtual is reality in today’s data centers. With this new reality comes greater complexity and new challenges. Customers I talk with realize their storage is strategic to the success of their business. These customers want virtualized storage that is fast, flexible, and reliable. To address this growing demand Coraid has released a new storage virtualization product that changes the virtualization game by simplifying and reducing the complexity to deploy, manage and grow storage in virtual environments.

The EtherDrive® VSX virtualization appliance brings storage virtualization features to Ethernet SANs, including logical volume management, synchronous mirroring, snapshots and cloning. The VSX virtualization appliance is designed to provide virtualization across the SAN not just within a single storage array like most other storage systems. The VSX appliances can support multiple Coraid disk arrays over Ethernet with no direct cabling, enabling customers to simply add capacity without the need to configure or pay for more software. This ability to start small and scale up without having to buy more software or upgrade from a small storage box to a big storage box reduces cost, reduces complexity and represents a real change in the storage virtualization market.

IT organizations are expected to do more with the same or fewer resources. To keep up, IT administrators require the ability to allocate storage for any application based on the latest business needs, and to do so non-disruptively, quickly and easily. The VSX represents a new class of storage appliance that provides “enterprise-class” storage virtualization for an entire Ethernet SAN, allowing IT administrators to respond to complex storage needs quickly and reliably.