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22 August 2012 | Coraid Unveils EtherCloud for Software-Defined Storage
Coraid Unveils EtherCloud for Software-Defined Storage
Policy-based cloud automation connects storage to networking and application Infrastructure with one-click deployment
Redwood City, CA —Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions with more than 1,500 customers worldwide, today unveiled its EtherCloud™ platform for software-defined storage. Built on technology from Coraid’s acquisition of Yunteq, a provider of cloud orchestration software, in late 2011, EtherCloud delivers enhanced business agility to architects of the modern data center by radically simplifying delivery of scale-out infrastructure. EtherCloud leverages a powerful policy engine and representational state transfer application programming interfaces (REST APIs) to connect data-center infrastructure to applications, enabling complete programmability and one-click provisioning of enterprise storage.
“With the rapid, and increasing, commoditization of hardware for computing, networking and storage, CIOs are increasingly realizing and embracing the need to shift from traditional IT strategies to highly virtualized and automated infrastructures, preferably running on scale-out building blocks and Ethernet,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. “Server virtualization has become the norm for compute platforms, and software-defined networking is rapidly reshaping the networking industry. To complete the transformation, Coraid is now combining its scale-out EtherDrive storage platform with its new EtherCloud automation platform to become an early leader in software-defined storage.”
Traditional storage management in highly dynamic cloud environments is complex, resource-intensive and error-prone at scale. Storage administrators are burdened with translating application requirements into storage configurations, which they then have to set up manually. Frequent changes to the environment necessitate constant monitoring and reconfiguration to ensure conformance to service level agreements (SLAs). Software-defined storage allows storage designers and operators to control how storage is deployed, provisioned and managed through software, enabling automation, templates, self-service models and a broader range of cloud-computing services.
The explosion of data worldwide, estimated by analysts at 50 percent annual compounded growth, is testing the limits of the economics and scalability of deploying and managing traditional “big iron” storage. Coraid’s EtherDrive storage brings simplicity, superior price-performance and just-in-time scalability to storage infrastructure. Coraid EtherCloud complements the capabilities of EtherDrive storage with a REST-based interface and policy-based automation to ensure maximum flexibility and programmability at multi-petabyte scale.
EtherCloud Platform
EtherCloud introduces a powerful policy engine and automation framework that enables one-click provisioning of sophisticated enterprise storage configurations, simplifying capacity and performance management. This allows IT administrators and end users to reduce infrastructure-provisioning times from weeks to minutes. Using a rich set of REST APIs that expose every aspect of storage provisioning and operational management, administrators can easily automate complex workflows and integrate storage management into IT operations.
Key features of EtherCloud include:
- Ability to create pools of storage that can be automatically created and grown on demand
- One-click instantiation of VMware ESXi virtual machines, integrated with storage allocation and networking connectivity
- Multitenancy and integration with lightweight directory access protocol/Active Directory (LDAP/AD) for authentication
- Metering of compute, network and storage use
- Ability to integrate with open networking and cloud frameworks, as well as with a variety of industry-standard file systems
“EtherCloud breaks through the complexity of legacy storage management, replacing it with a flexible, automated, programmable platform. This allows enterprise and cloud customers to provision and manage petabytes of high-performance block and file storage with the same simplicity found in consumer cloud services,” said Anil Virmani, senior vice president of engineering at Coraid. “We are excited to enable the next generation of software-defined data centers and drive complexity out of the most challenging layer of the data center today – storage.”
"We are aggressively investing in the next-generation data center built on software-defined infrastructure to better serve our customers at scale,” said Tim Dufour, CEO of RackForce, the leading cloud service provider in Canada. “As an early access customer of EtherCloud, we are excited by its potential to automate our storage environment. This directly translates to lower management overhead, more efficient operations and better economics."
EtherCloud will be available in Q3 2012 – please visit Ethercloud for details.
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