Coraid and Pluribus Networks Partner to Deliver Software-Defined Storage Fabrics

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Coraid®, a leading provider of scale-out Ethernet storage solutions, and Pluribus Networks, the front-runner in hardware-accelerated network virtualization for private and public cloud datacenters, today announced a partnership to build a storage network solution that delivers enhanced end-to-end security, dynamic flexibility and simplicity. The solution will leverage the Pluribus Netvisor® Software-Defined Fabric to combine best-of-breed network infrastructure with Coraid EtherDrive® and EtherCloud™, enabling customers to build flexible software-defined data centers that can be programmed to rapidly deliver new services.

The Pluribus Networks network hypervisor technology transforms software-defined storage network scalability by providing network service-level abstractions for large-scale multi-tenancy, powered by distributed Fabric intelligence. With multi-million flow processing, always-on traffic analytics and lossless, high bandwidth, low latency classes, software-defined storage is guaranteed the network resources it demands in a fully virtualized Fabric.

Coraid's EtherDrive scale-out storage platform uses connectionless, standard Layer 2 Ethernet as a converged network infrastructure, enabling elasticity, geographic distribution and massively parallel performance. Coraid's EtherCloud automation platform allows enterprise and cloud customers to serve up underlying storage capacity as flexible storage cloud services with one-click, self-service storage provisioning.

The combined Pluribus-Coraid solution allows administrators to flexibly define network flows that control storage traffic from the host down to the storage systems. These flows enable network traffic isolation in a multi-tenant environment for security, quality of service (QoS), and resource management. The Pluribus network hypervisor with its vFlow capability makes storage aware of traffic patterns and hotspots in the storage network.

Additional benefits of the interoperability of Pluribus Networks' Netvisor (Network Hypervisor) with Coraid EtherDrive and EtherCloud include:

• Ability to scale and rapidly deploy Software-Defined Storage Networks in private and public cloud environments;
• The Pluribus network hypervisor natively understands Coraid's ATA over Ethernet (AoE) traffic and optimizes for storage-class Quality of Service (QoS), such as parsing shelf / slot attributes in the AoE header;
• Built-in, always-on network and storage connection-based analytics, deep-packet inspection and logging;
• Control an entire network of switches, compared to conventional overlay SDN solutions that interact only with hypervisors or network edge switches.

"The modern datacenter is going through the biggest transformation it has seen in more than a decade," said Anil Virmani, Senior VP of Engineering at Coraid. "Computing has already made the transition with the advent of scale-out servers and server virtualization. We are now seeing a similar shift in networks and storage, away from manually-configured scale-up designs to software-defined, scale-out infrastructure that is better suited to modern applications and IT provisioning models."

In the newly evolved virtualized IT infrastructure, any application on any server must have access to any data location or storage array to be agile and flexible. There are important classes of applications requiring deterministic, low latency and/or high bandwidth access to data. For many of these applications, which include database, data mining, high transactions, media feeds, virtual desktops, requirements are not being fulfilled resulting in these applications not being scalable or agile as needed. There is a great need to virtualize the paths or networks between applications and their data.

"Pluribus' and Coraid's best-in-class network and storage technologies dovetail to provide the optimal networked storage solution for the software defined datacenter-- a software-defined storage network as a programmable and extensible infrastructure that responds instantly to changes in business, end-user requirements and market demands," said Robert Drost, Co-Founder and CEO at Pluribus Networks. "First, the Pluribus Software-Defined Fabric provides massive ability to isolate, guarantee bandwidth and latency, and analyze Coraid's storage classes. Next, we support Coraid's ground-breaking AoE protocol natively with flow-aware mapping of storage traffic between Pluribus VNETs and Coraid AoE initiators and targets. This translates to true SLAs for Platinum, Gold, and Silver-class quality of service on a shared infrastructure—ultra-high-end enterprise SAN SLAs will finally be available at a much lower TCO to all."

Availability

The Pluribus Networks Netvisor® solution is generally available to customers on the Pluribus Networks F64 Series Intelligent Top-of-Rack (iTOR) Server-Switch platform and select ODM "white-box" switches sourced directly from original design manufacturers.

About Coraid

Coraid redefines storage with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive and EtherCloud solutions. Coraid delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and an elastic storage architecture to handle massive data growth and cloud automation. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud architectures, Coraid's platform has been deployed by more than 1,700 customers worldwide. For more information, please visit www.coraid.com.

About Pluribus Networks

Pluribus Networks is a leader in performance-oriented network virtualization for private and public cloud datacenters. Pluribus delivers the flexibility of virtual infrastructure with the performance of a bare-metal network. Our systems transform how IT administrators deploy applications so they can realize productivity gains and enable new business models. Pluribus Networks delivers operational excellence by optimizing datacenter network utilization while maintaining required levels of performance, reliability, and availability. Information about Pluribus Networks can be found at www.pluribusnetworks.com.

Coraid and EtherDrive are registered trademarks of Coraid Inc. EtherCloud, CorOS, Zero Hour Support, EtherFlash, Yunteq, and Scale-Out Virtual Storage are trademarks of Coraid, Inc. Pluribus Networks, the Pluribus Networks logo, Server-Switch™, iTOR™, Netvisor®, nvOS®, and vManage® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pluribus Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Pluribus Networks