Athens, Ga, January 13, 2005—Coraid Inc., maker of EtherDrive Storage Blades announced today that the ATA-over-Ethernet protocol used in their EtherDrive storage product has now been included in the main Linux 2.6 Kernel. Coraid’s EtherDrive Storage Blade is the first hardware product that uses the ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol and looks forward to its widespread adoption after its inclusion in the 2.6 kernel.
The Linux 2.6 kernel can now natively use the AoE network protocol to communicate with any block device which utilizes AoE. AoE is an Ethernet network protocol with advantages over TCP/IP. Since it’s simple it doesn’t require a TCP off-load engine or Host Bus Adapter. AoE puts ATA disk commands directly into Ethernet frames. These packets are non-routable, which provides inherent secure.
Coraid’s EtherDrive Storage Blades provide a low cost networked storage solution using Ethernet connections between the server and a shared storage array (pool). Multiple servers can access a common disk storage system eliminating wasted captive storage. This also allow servers to be sized to meet their application load not by how much storage capacity they can hold. With EtherDrive Storage Blades, the storage pool can be expanded easily with simple Ethernet connections. Storage array performance is limited only by the number of disks configured for RAID stripping and the speed of the Ethernet connection at the server. EtherDrive Storage Blades are Direct Network Attached (DNA) block storage. DNA provides an Ethernet interface for hard disk drives. If hardware RAID is desired, the combination of EtherDrive storage with Coraid’s RAIDBlade/20 Controller provides AoE RAID sets for any application.
About Coraid
Founded in 2000, Coraid is focused on developing, manufacturing, marketing and supporting innovative solutions for networked storage. Our core value is simplicity. Our mission is to make storage easier and more affordable for any server application. Coraid developed the Open Standards-based ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol which it has implemented into its EtherDrive(R) Storage Blade products. This powerful and efficient protocol leverages the cost advantages of Ethernet to provide true networked storage. For more information please contact Coraid at 877-548-7200 and visit our web site at http://www.coraid.com“
