ACADEMIA

Coraid announced that Premier Health Care Services has implemented Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet SAN and VMware solutions to virtualize and consolidate its IT infrastructure for efficiency, agility and data protection. Premier is an Emergency Medicine Physician Group based in Dayton, Ohio, which partners with hospitals to improve the quality and delivery of emergency-department patient care. Established in 1987, Premier is one of the leading and most respected providers of physician services in the greater Midwest and Southeast.

"We were running out of storage space and needed to replace our existing Fibre Channel storage system with a solution that would accommodate our growth of data, support our VMware server virtualization efforts, improve storage performance and simplify our SAN environment," said Steve Brown, director of information technology, Premier Health Care Services.

"We like Coraid and ATA over Ethernet (AoE). With AoE and 10 GbE, we didn't have to sacrifice performance to simplify our storage environment," said Brown.

Another reason Premier decided to implement Coraid is for its "one-tier-for-all" design, a single-building-block architecture that supports solid state disk (SSD), SAS and SATA disk drives in the same chassis and allows Premier to scale-out its storage capacity as its data needs grow.

Coraid EtherDrive solutions provide enterprises of all sizes with flexible, scale-out, high-performance storage. Using innovative software, off-the-shelf hardware and standard Ethernet, Coraid EtherDrive storage arrays provide lower OPEX and a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy storage. EtherDrive is ideally suited to dynamic high-performance computing, virtualization, video and cloud computing environments.

Coraid leverages raw Ethernet with AoE and the CorOS distributed-storage operating system to deliver better than Fibre Channel performance at up to 1800 MB/s of throughput using low-cost, industry standard hardware. The arrays scale to multiple petabytes with a flat Ethernet SAN topology and connectionless, parallel design. Deployment and configuration of EtherDrive are simple; a host can configure and address new storage in under 60 seconds. The scale-out design also enables a Zero-Hour Support customer-service offering based on Coraid's disk-portability technology, which allows users to swap drives between arrays for upgrades, service reconfiguration, data transfers or disaster recovery on the fly.