Coraid Upends NAS Storage Market

The EtherDrive Z-Series makes use of the open source ZFS file system to create a NAS appliance that leverage’s CorAid’s approach to attaching storage to the network via a high speed Ethernet interface that is capable of providing throughput speeds of up to 900MB per second, said Carl Wright, Coraid executive vice president of sales and product management.

The EtherDrive Z-Series leverages a new approach to accessing storage that makes use of a direct Ethernet connection developed by Coraid rather than protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel. This approach allows Coraid to deliver NAS and SAN appliances that are substantially faster than rival offerings from companies such as NetApp and EMC at price points that are hundreds of thousands of dollars less.

Wright said customers are becoming “sick and tired of paying outrageous prices for storage that is not only overly complex to deploy and manage, but also comes with annual maintenance fees that sap IT budgets."

Coraid, in contrast, is delivering a NAS appliance that leverages a ZFS file system that comes with built-in data deduplication, compression, replication, automatic tiering and thin provisioning capabilities that Wright said rival storage vendors typically charge extra for.

The EtherDrive Z-Series can be configured with either 1 or 10Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.