Coraid's new SATA EtherDrive Storage Ideal for Hosting Companies [May 9, 2005]

San Clemente, CA, May 9, 2005 - Coraid announced today that its innovative EtherDrive Storage product is now available for Serial ATA disk drives. In a move resulting from market feedback, in part by the hosting industry, the company has upgraded its EtherDrive Storage appliance with a list of features considered high priority by hosting companies.

The refined chassis design includes 15 hot swap drive bays which accommodate standard SATA disk drives. The new shelf offers a dual GigE Interface, redundant hot swap power modules and fans. Fully populated drive bays using 400 GB disk drives yield 6 TB of storage, but using 500 GB drives, the new Coraid shelf provides an impressive 7.5 TB of storage.

This ultra reliable storage appliance uses the AoE (ATA over Ethernet) protocol, the simplest, most efficient, and lowest cost means for networked storage. Using Ethernet connections, EtherDrive Storage Blades appear to servers on the network as locally attached disks. EtherDrive Storage can easily be assembled into large RAID sets and storage volumes.

Like Coraid's PATA product which is used by numerous hosting companies, the new SATA platform provides extreme scalability. Exceeding storage capacity proves nearly impossible as storage arrays are limited only by physical rack space. The SATA EtherDrive shelf has dual GigE connections, so storage array performance is fast and reliable. A single shelf can provide 200MB/sec. of storage access throughput and because the AoE protocol is so simple, almost any host can saturate its Ethernet connections to the storage and still have CPU cycles left for the servers main applications.

EtherDrive Storage is less expensive than any other networked storage. Traditional fibre channel SAN's are very expensive and can prove cost prohibitive for many companies. Fibre channel requires a large footprint, expensive fibre channel switches and complicated management software. iSCSI is burdened with the processing of TCP/IP, creating bottlenecks. The price of the new SATA EtherDrive Storage is only $3,995 Using 400 GB SATA disk drives at their current price, a complete 6 TB shared storage solution can now be assembled for $1.32/GB, helping to provide hosting companies with a clear cut competitive advantage.

About Coraid
Coraid designs and manufactures innovative networked storage appliances. The "power of simple" makes our storage products affordable. Coraid developed the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol which is used by EtherDrive storage products. This powerful and efficient protocol leverages the cost advantages of Ethernet to provide true networked storage. For more information on how Coraid can start saving your company money, please contact us at 877-548-7200 and visit our web site at
http://www.coraid.com.