Coraid, Inc.

Coraid, Inc.

Former type	Private
Industry	Data Storage
Founded	2000
Founder	Brantley Coile
Defunct	2015
Headquarters	Redwood City, California, U.S.
Key people	CEO: Dave Kresse CTO: Brantley Coile
Products	EtherDrive SRX, EtherDrive VSX, EtherFlash, EtherCloud, NAS, AoE, SAN
Website	www.coraid.com

Coraid, Inc. was a computer data storage vendor that provided storage area network (SAN) products that used Ethernet, headquartered in Redwood City, California.^[1]

History

The company was founded by Brantley Coile, who previously worked on the Cisco PIX firewall and Cisco LocalDirector products. Coile began the research and development phase of the company in 2000 after leaving Cisco Systems, and developed the ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol, which enables storage networking using raw Ethernet frames for transport.

The company began selling its EtherDrive family of storage arrays in 2004. The open AoE protocol was released to the Linux community, and included in the Linux kernel since 2005, starting with version 2.6.11.^[2][3]

Coraid was backed with a total of $114.3 million in funding. The company received a first, $10 million round of institutional financing from two venture capital funds in January 2010,^[4][5] at the same time introducing new management and an advisory board. The company also moved its headquarters to Redwood City, CA early in 2010. Coraid secured an additional $25 million in Series B funding in November 2010, followed by a third round of $50M in November 2011.^[6] In December 2013 the company received its final round of $29.3M.

The company website said they had more than 1,700 customers in sectors including media, hosting service providers, telecommunications, healthcare, aerospace, manufacturing, and government.

On January 15, 2015 The Register reported of sources saying the company had shut its doors, but support calls were still being taken. The CEO acknowledged a funding shortfall; however, there has been no official shut down announcement as of January 23, 2015.

On January 23, 2015, the company sent mass emails to partners and customers stating that it was no longer taking orders, taking support calls, or honoring return requests.

On April 15, 2015, the company was foreclosed, and all assets and intellectual property became the property of the primary debt holder.

May 2015, The Brantley Coile Company bought all the EtherDrive SRX and VSX assets.

Brantley Coile's new company, SouthSuite Software released a new version of the Coraid software called SR704 and is providing on going development of the AoE devices as a software only product.

In August 2016, SouthSuite acquired the Coraid trademark.^[7]

EtherDrive and EtherFlash storage

AoE is a second generation SAN transport protocol using layer 2 of the OSI model of network communications, "raw Ethernet." Coraid designed both hard disk drive and solid-state drive flash storage arrays.

Coraid marketed EtherDrive and EtherFlash. The company's products competed with Fibre Channel and iSCSI products using block-based storage.

Support for the OpenStack Cinder block storage service was added with OpenStack "Grizzly".^[8] The driver was removed in OpenStack "Kilo" due to lack of feedback to the call for CI/testing.^[9]

ZFS

A Coraid EtherDrive storage cluster (SAN)

Introduced in 2012, the ZX line of appliances provided a ZFS NAS interface to EtherDrive storage. The ZX-Series appliances provided Ethernet SAN performance together with advanced features supported by Oracle's file system, including high availability, deduplication, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, and continuous integrity checking with automatic repair and high scalability.

EtherCloud

A software-defined storage technology, EtherCloud enabled provisioning and automation of storage, as well as REST APIs for integration into OpenStack and the network, server, virtualization and application layers. Coraid also supported VMware ESXi environments through the custom and self-supported driver.^[10]

References