Low Cost Enterprise Storage? Yes!

SecurityDude, CISSP-ISSAP is an IT consultant, Security & Privacy Advocate and blogger at large with over 20 years IT experience. SecurityDude shares tips, tricks, and info that the average networking professional will find interesting and indispensable.

Although I have been building RAID arrays since the old IDA adapter in the Compaq SystemPro 386, I am a relative newcomer to the world of enterprise storage (SAN & NAS).  I have a fairly good grasp of the big players such as HP, NetApp, IBM and EMC, but their products come with “enterprise” price tags and complexity. 

There is a company called Coraid, Inc. in Athens Georgia that is quietly taking a very different approach to enterprise storage. 

Although Fibre Channel is a mature technology with lots of redundancy and high performance, the disk drives, shelves, HBAs and switches are very expensive.  iSCSI is perceived as a less-expensive alternative that allows you to access storage over the network you already own,  but iSCSI includes the heavy burden of TCP/IP encapsulation.

So what’s so special about Coraid’s approach?  Coriad decided that since Fibre Channel is too expensive and iSCSI is performance constrained, they chose a third path.  They authored a new open source protocol called AoE (ATA over Ethernet).  AoE is a very lightweight protocol that operates at Layer 2 of the OSI model.  AoE allows you connect to their line of EtherDrive® storage appliances that use inexpensive consumer-grade SATA hard drives.  The EtherDrive® SATA/RAID appliances offer flexible on-board RAID options including JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 & RAID 10 (there are hints that RAID 6 will be available soon via a free firmware update).

I recently became a Coraid customer, and I am amazed at how far my storage dollar spreads.  I purchased a 15-slot SR1521 and plugged in 10 Seagate Barracuda 500Gbdrives for a raw capacity of 5Tb.  After creating two RAID 5 arrays for fault-tolerance, I have two 2Tb AoE SAN LUN’s I can mount.  Guess how much?  The 10 disk drives only set me back $750.00 + S/H.  This plus the SR1521T brings the total to just under $5,000.00. I still have 5 empty slots to fill.  Once the price of 1.5Tb drives drops, I can populate this appliance with 22.5Tb raw storage.  Imagine, 22Tb for under $10,00.00!  That kind of capacity in a NetApp or HP solution would put you somewhere in the six figures range.

As an interesting side note, the author of the AoE protocol is Brantley Coile.  That may not exactly be a household name, but Brantley is the software engineer who created the PIX Firewall.  After Cisco purchased Brantley’s company in 1995, PIX went on to become one of the most successful firewalls in the world.  Brantley is a Coraid’s founder & CTO.

I hope you find this useful.

Tags: AoE, ata over ethernet, coraid, fibre channel, iscsi, low cost storage, network storage, raid arrays