Coraid has announced that Fiberlink Communications Corp., a leading innovator and trusted enterprise partner for secure mobile workforce solutions, has selected the Coraid 3U SATA-RAID EtherDrive Storage appliance to archive its standby offsite cold databases. Fiberlink's configuration includes eight 500GB SATA disks for a total of four terabytes of storage attached to a network supporting an HP ProLiant server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We were looking for an inexpensive alternative to SAN solutions," said Justin Cirelli, Fiberlink's UNIX system administrator. "We evaluated some serial ATA SANs, and also looked at SCSI JBODs, but they were far more expensive than the EtherDrive. We wanted a scalable solution that allowed us to use off-the-shelf serial ATA disks, and EtherDrive Storage provides that functionality. Best of all, when we put the product to use, the EtherDrive's performance exceeded our expectations with extremely fast write speeds, an important feature for our application. It's an excellent product for the price."

Coraid's 3U SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage appliance provides direct network attachment (DNA) block storage that connects with servers via Ethernet connections. The appliance can connect up to 15 serial ATA disks configured into one or more RAID sets with a maximum capacity of 7.5 terabytes of storage (depending on disk size). DNA uses the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol that bypasses TCP/IP processing, eliminating the need for expensive network adapters. Disks inside the appliance can be assembled into RAID sets including RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and concatenated/linear combinations.

Since each EtherDrive Storage appliance has its own Gigabit Ethernet connections, storage system performance increases directly proportional to the number of appliances in the system. Adding a new appliance to the storage system adds more processing power, which increases throughput and IOPS performance. As a result, there are no limits to how many disks can be attached to a single server.