SAN upstart Coraid AXING staff, struggling to survive – sources Multiple sources have told us that Etherdrive storage SAN startup Coraid is floundering and staffers are losing their jobs after the firm spent over $100m trying to launch itself as a viable business. The UK service office has no staffer answering calls, Coraid in Australia gives out a recorded message asking for your number …
When were they anything but niche? ATA over ethernet itself I'm not even sure I'd say that is niche, it's something below niche..if such a thing exists I don't know.
I knew someone who worked there a few years ago, the concept sounded a bit interesting but the product wasn't something I could find myself using at any of the companies I have worked at. I'm sure it has it's use cases, just not in my network.
The first CoRaid product was a physical ATA-to-Ethernet bridge that connected a cheap commodity disk to a 10Mbps ethernet port. The idea was that a good ethernet switch could be used to build a middling SAN that would cost at least 90% less than any solution involving Fiber Channel.
Back when disks had ribbon cables and companies had dedicated storage teams, our SAN Department was upset because the CoRaid solution was both excellent and disruptively inexpensive. At the time, the notion that ethernet technology could eclipse either SCSI performance or FC fabrics was novel.
After getting their AoE driver into the Linux kernel, near the time when libata was superseding libide, CoRaid pivoted into the software defined storage market. They probably did this to get an easier margin, but this space was soon overrun by OpenZFS appliances.
Afterwards, CoRaid lacked a differentiator because the AoE hardware was never updated for SATA, and because ZFS+iSCSI performance caught up through things like multi-core CPUs and offload engines on mid-range ethernet adapters.
CoRaid is a business study in how one good idea can carry a company for more than a decade through more than $100M in investment despite mediocre executive management.
We wanted a simple SAN for our network and came across the CoRaid SR1521 with 15 Hot swap SATA bays. We started out with 1TB drives then over the years upgraded to 3TB drives. This thing is "simple" so won't be suitable for "Enterprise" networks. It booted up in less than 10s which made me wonder what kind of OS it was running. My cyclic infatuation with Plan9 was all thanks to this unit :-)
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