Developments of the week in storage
Coraid, which relaunched earlier this year with an AoE (ATA over Ethernet) appliance line, last Wednesday announced the EtherDrive Z-Series NAS appliance. The appliance combines the ZFS file system with Coraid's AoE technology and includes support for a long line of features — 10 Gigabit Ethernet, in-line deduplication, replication, snapshots, compression, automatic tiering, continuous data protection, file search and thin provisioning. The EtherDrive Z-Series is available in two models – the Z2000 and ZX3000. The Z2000 has four cores, 32GB of RAM and either eight 1G Ethernet or four 10G Ethernet ports.
The ZX3000 has double the cores of the Z2000 and features 48GB of RAM, L2 solid state drive cache and the same Ethernet connectivity options.
The Z-Series NAS appliances can be configured in active-active cluster mode to provide fault tolerance. They support network
connected shared file storage and protocols including NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS, FTP, RSYNC and WebDAV.
Coraid populates the Z2000 and ZX3000 with any combination of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Serial ATA (SATA) or solid state
drives within the same enclosure.
Coraid originally invented the AoE block storage protocol, which uses Ethernet to transport ATA disk commands without the overhead associated with TCP/IP.
The company was founded in 2000 by Brantley Coile, who patented AoE. With $10 million in funding and new CEO Kevin Brown, formerly of NetApp's Decru, Coraid is set to take off with its AoE storage appliances.
The appliances start at less than $1,000 per TB and are expected to be available next month.
Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.
Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.
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