EtherDrive ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE)-based SAN Breaks through Cost Barriers to Storage Virtualization with Best Price to Performance for SMBs

CORAID, providers of affordably fast SAN, today announced that its popular EtherDrive® storage family of appliances now supports VMware vSphere 4 to provide simple, integrated and affordable storage for virtualized and non-virtualized environments. With over 1500 customers worldwide, CORAID EtherDrive delivers an unmatched price to performance storage virtualization environment that is based on the open storage protocol ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) and costs just one-fourth of the price of competing products.  CORAID’s EtherDrive SAN provides businesses with a way to efficiently migrate their storage infrastructure to Ethernet for a considerably more affordable virtualized storage environment and now leverages the benefits of VMware’s vSphere operating environment, which includes VMware ESX and VMware ESXi. "CORAID continues to change the rules of the game in SAN storage.  By driving out the cost and complexity of running SANs on VMware, EtherDrive now gives VMware users a truly affordable and easy to use SAN that is ideal for small and medium sized data centers – both for its management of the storage footprint and price. EtherDrive lets the SMB access the benefits of virtualization without the high price tag or vendor lockin," commented Jim Kemp, CEO CORAID.

CORAID EtherDrive SANs are affordable, less complex and easily scalable storage that uses the AoE storage protocol to provide a simple and reliable alternative to more complex and expensive iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN technologies.  Built on open AoE, EtherDrive provides enterprise-class storage that easily leverages the most popular virtualization technologies.  By moving to simple Ethernet technology, customers can dramatically reduce their overall storage complexity and improve performance using AoE to achieve 36% better read throughput and 90% for writes.