Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/08/coraid_and_arista/

Coraid accesses storage with Arista

Arista accelerating AoE access

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Channel, 8th March 2011 14:26 GMT

Coraid is allying with Andy Bechtolsheim's Arista to accelerate access to its storage.

Customers would use Arista 10GBitE switches, such as the 7500, to get faster access to their Coraid EtherDrive arrays using the lightweight ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol. This has a lower network overhead than iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and doesn't need specialised Fibre Channel fabrics to link accessing servers and storage.

Arista likes the deal because it emphasises Ethernet as the network transport – and Coraid is an Ethernet-only storage array supplier. Coraid likes it because Arista is a highly reputable player in the Ethernet switching market and adds networking "oomph" to its marketing message.

Coraid's EVP for worldwide sales and business development, Carl Wright, said in a canned quote: "Arista and Coraid share a common vision of the modern data centre: extensive virtualisation, end-to-end Ethernet, flexible topologies and low cost scale-out hardware."

The two companies assert that the Arista-Coraid stack enables faster performance than Fibre Channel and FCoE alternatives, "at approximately one-fifth the cost and enables storage capacity to be deployed in minutes".

Arista says its Zero Touch Provisioning capabilities are the means to do this. ®