The key component beyond ease of use is performance. The use of raw Ethernet, not encumbered by TCP/IP overhead, allows AoE to generate similar if not better performance numbers than FC. The other performance advantage is AoE’s port flooding capability. The protocol automatically uses all available ports in an aggregated fashion, allowing for incredible data transfer bandwidth to and from the device.

Combine ease of use with performance,then add CORAID’s aggressive price points and the offering becomes very compelling. CORAID claims to be one-fifth the cost of competing products; compelling indeed, especially when measured on a price/performance ratio. For example while an iSCSI solution in theory may be able to get into the same price range as an AoE solution it won’t offer the same level of performance. The modifications that you would have to do to the iSCSI solution to generate comparable performance returns the significant price advantage back to CORAID.

Storage Swiss Take

The CORAID message is catching on, especially in the server virtualization space because it matches the environment’s storage implementation and its use is as fluid as the hypervisors it supports. For many of CORAID’s customers this is the first shared storage system they’ve ever had. They need a solution that can be implemented simply, scale to meet growing storage demands and provide the performance to address the severely random I/O that a virtual environment creates.

CORAID has a very simple question to ask. Instead of converting a fibre channel protocol to run over an ethernet signal, as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) does, or converting SCSI commands to run over Ethernet, as iSCSI does - both of which use IP -  why not use raw Ethernet frames as ATA over Ethernet (AoE) does? As CORAID’s CEO, Kevin Brown puts it, “TCP/IP is great when I need to send an email around the world but if I need to send storage traffic to the next rack it creates too much overhead”.

CORAID storage solutions use raw Ethernet to transmit storage traffic. Simply plug them into your Ethernet network, power them up and you are ready to start writing data. They claim to go from out-of-the-box to writing data within 60 seconds. CORAID is a Storage Switzerland client and we have detailed their products and use cases in the past.