Cloud Computing: Coraid Unveils ZX-Series NAS

July 17, 2012 Off By David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

Coraid on Tuesday unveiled the new Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers. Designed for cloud, video and Big Data customers, this high-performance unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable unmatched scalability, performance and operational simplicity.

Carl Wright, executive vice president at Coraid noted that "organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth. By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN."…

Ideal for Cloud, Video and Big Data Workloads
Capturing, storing and analyzing ever-larger sets of human- and machine-generated data stresses the scalability of legacy NAS systems. The ZX-Series is ideal for processing large data sets such as consumer behavior analysis or HD and 3D video format editing because it provides the massive throughput and scale necessary to support accelerating data growth.

The ZX-Series delivers extreme performance using read- and write-optimized flash caches and massively parallel 1Gb/10Gb Ethernet connectivity. By connecting to Coraid EtherDrive SRX arrays via ATA over Ethernet for a scale-out architecture, the ZX-Series scales performance to multi-petabyte capacity across a shared pool. The performance and scale is complemented by advanced data protection and efficiency features including triple-parity RAID, redundant array of independent nodes (RAIN), active-active clustering, unlimited snapshots, deduplication and compression.

"Our research confirms that scale-out storage designs built on Ethernet align well with the evolving architecture of the virtualized data center," said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. "Functions such as hybrid storage pools, data deduplication and compression optimize storage utilization, thus reducing acquisition costs and improving total cost of ownership (TCO)."

Coraid ZX-Series features include:

Coraid EtherDrive integration for multi-petabyte scalability and simplicity
Real-time analysis and diagnosis of performance to monitor and enforce service levels
Active-active cluster option for high availability
Data compression and in-line deduplication to improve storage efficiency
File-based snapshots, clones and replication for data protection
Automated storage hierarchy with hybrid storage pools (HSPs) containing DRAM, flash cache and HDDs to optimize performance
Seamless multiprotocol integration and secure data sharing between Microsoft Windows, Linux and UNIX environments

The Coraid ZX-Series is available immediately.