New EtherDrive SR821T AoE-based SAN Lowers Cost Barrier to Storage Virtualization, Eases Complexity in Quiet Tower Appliance

CORAID, providers of affordably fast SAN, today introduced the EtherDrive® SR821T Storage Appliance, the industry’s most affordable storage device that fully leverages the virtualization environment and benefits of VMware’s vSphere operating environment. CORAID, a leader in fast, affordable open technology storage solutions delivers an unmatched price to performance storage virtualization environment that is based on the open storage protocol ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE).  New EtherDrive SR821T provides businesses with the simplest way to efficiently migrate their storage infrastructure to Ethernet and operate a significantly more affordable virtualized storage environment. The EtherDrive SR821T is the newest member of Coraid’s popular and award-winning storage product line that utilizes the open AoE storage protocol to provide a simple and reliable alternative to more complex and expensive iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN technologies.  EtherDrive SR821T is designed for SMB storage environments that want to utilize the benefits of virtualization without the high price tag or vendor lockin. The appliance can hold up to 8 standard SATA I or II disk drives and scales to accommodate more than 16TB in total storage capacity. The SR821T and hosts dual 1Gbps network interfaces. The SR821T is a quiet tower unit that is designed for small businesses that don't generally have large storage equipment racks.

"By moving to simple Ethernet technology, our customers dramatically reduce storage complexity with improved performance. Testing shows AoE running on VMware delivers 36% better read throughput and 90% for writes. This breakthrough means using open storage and AoE-based storage virtualization not only protects against vendor lockin, but also achieves far better performance with considerably less investment," said Brantley Coile, CORAID CTO.  A comparison of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) running in a VMware® ESX™ environment versus iSCSI and Fibre Channel is available for download.