"We have seen radical shifts in compute and networking infrastructure in the past few years away from monolithic, hardware-focused architectures to software-defined scale-out resources that are managed and controlled entirely through software," said CEO Kevin Brown as Coraid, a leading provider of Ethernet storage solutions, recently announced another year of strong momentum, with sales doubling over the past year and growing by a factor of 12 in the last three years.

"It is now time for this transformation to come to storage as well," Brown added

"As cloud architectures become more prevalent, Ethernet-based storage will continue to grow share and dominate the market," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director for the storage software practice at IDC, continuing:

"This means that Ethernet and IP-based storage services will continue to gain adoption in the market. Suppliers like Coraid with mature software-defined storage and networking offerings on scale-out hardware will no doubt have an edge over the incumbents that have largely focused on Fibre Channel solutions."

Coraid solutions have been now deployed by more than 1,700 customers worldwide, spanning a wide variety of industries including manufacturing; finance; healthcare; education; public cloud service providers; federal, state and local governments; and defense.

The ever-busy Coraid booth at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (Nov 2012)

Coraid offers a full range of block, file and storage management and automation products that deliver breakthrough elasticity and simplicity at scale using a new generation of Ethernet-based storage networking. Coraid EtherDrive storage arrays feature a scale-out architecture that uses commodity hardware and a distributed operating system to pool storage resources into a single logical system.

In 2012, Coraid unveiled its EtherCloud™ platform for software-defined storage. Built on technology from the company's acquisition of Yunteq in late 2011, EtherCloud enhances business agility in the modern data center by radically simplifying delivery of scale-out infrastructure.

While other vendors talking about software-defined storage are still in the vision and planning stages and have very limited customer adoption, Coraid's CEO notes that EtherCloud has already been successfully deployed by more than 50 customers across the world.

"EtherCloud offers a rich set of features that enable simplicity at scale," says Brown.

Those features include:

• Pools of storage that can be automatically created and grown on demand
• Multi-tenancy
• Integration with LDAP/AD for authentication
• One-click instantiation of VMware ESXi virtual machines, integrated with storage allocation and networking connectivity
• Metering of compute, network and storage use
• The ability to integrate with open networking and cloud frameworks, as well as with a variety of industry-standard file systems

At the August 2012 VMworld conference in San Francisco, Coraid garnered industry-wide attention with the first demonstration of software-defined storage integrating with software-defined networking solutions from Nicira, Big Switch and Arista. Following the show, The Wall Street Journal named Coraid a "Top 50 Startup," and Bloomberg Businessweek cited the company as a "Hot Enterprise Startup."