Coraid scoffs cloud platform startup

Coraid, the developer of the simplest Ethernet SAN storage, has bought cloud orchestration software maker Yunteq.

Coraid's Ethernet SAN uses the AoE (ATA over Ethernet) protocol, which is more straightforward than iSCSI, and the company's newish and busy management is trying to establish. The firm now has more than 1,400 customers and knows it has to get into the cloud if it is to gain sales from customers heading into the digital skies. This moves comes on top of recent activity in the flash storage and object storage areas.

It has gone and bought Yunteq too, and, no, we have not come across Yunteq before either.

Yunteq is a startup founded in 2009 and based in San Mateo, with as many as ten employees according to LinkedIn. Its CEO is Nakul Saraiya, and Coraid is sure to like what he has to say: "The future of computing is scale-out, commodity hardware, elasticity, Ethernet, and automation."

Yunteq fairly basic website says: "Yunteq provides orchestration and management software for cloud providers and enterprises building policy-driven, automated, and cost-efficient infrastructure clouds." The product is called the YunController.

Coraid says its "resource management framework and policy-driven orchestration engine automate provisioning and policies at the network, storage, and security layers". It supports multi-tenancy and has a RESTful API.

Jon Greaves, the CTO of Yunteq's first customer, Carpathia Hosting, is quoted in Coraid's release: "Carpathia’s cloud services include the ability to autoscale capacity based on event triggers. Yunteq enables a powerful platform for us to easily customise policies for every customer, while automating the execution of those policies through a software engine." That sounds cool.

An integrated Coraid/Yunteq product should arrive before mid-2012, with cloud services having automated, policy-driven provisioning of Coraid Ethernet SAN storage as part of an automated provisioning service for cloud suppliers. The acquisition terms were not disclosed but single digit millions or less plus Coraid stock options look a likely purchase arrangement. ®