OpenStack Incorporates Coraid Drivers for Software-Defined Storage

Coraid, a leading provider of software-defined storage solutions, today announced that it has contributed drivers for ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) and Coraid EtherCloud to OpenStack Block Storage. The AoE driver enables storage access over connectionless, massively parallel 10 Gigabit Ethernet, providing superior performance versus legacy storage networking. These drivers will allow public, private and hybrid OpenStack-based clouds to seamlessly integrate with Coraid's EtherDrive and EtherCloud platforms to deliver scalable, automated storage services. Coraid also announced that it has joined the OpenStack community as a corporate sponsor.

OpenStack has emerged as a popular infrastructure-as-a-service platform for cloud builders who are designing automated software-defined architectures. Coraid has a long history of collaboration with the open source community, and worked with longtime partner Alyseo to develop the OpenStack Block Storage integration. Coraid is the first commercial storage platform to combine scale-out enterprise block storage with a powerful policy engine for automated storage management, providing ideal building blocks for modern data centers.

"Coraid has a long history of commitment to open source, starting with the contribution of the ATA-over-Ethernet driver to the Linux kernel in 2005," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "Coraid's contribution to OpenStack Block Storage enables enterprises and service providers to build open-source clouds while leveraging Coraid's elastic, scale-out storage and automation platforms to deliver simplicity at scale."

Coraid's drivers integrate with OpenStack Block Storage allowing end users to provision and manage volumes on Coraid EtherDrive storage. The integration leverages the powerful REST APIs provided by Coraid EtherCloud that expose every aspect of storage provisioning and operational management to programmatic control. EtherCloud also provides a rich policy engine and automation framework that enable one-click provisioning of enterprise-class storage, simplifying capacity and performance management. This allows IT administrators and end users to reduce infrastructure-provisioning times from weeks to minutes. Using EtherCloud, administrators can deliver underlying block storage as services that automatically create volumes with specific performance and availability characteristics, including flash acceleration and no-single-point-of-failure configurations.

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