Engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., needed a storage system to back up critical data from their Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) program.

They found a solution with the SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage appliance from Coraid Inc. in San Clemente, Calif.

When it launches in April 2008, SDO will help scientists understand how solar variations influence life on earth as well as on technological systems. The first Space Weather Research network mission in NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) Program, it will determine how the sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured, and how its magnetic field is converted and released as solar wind. For more information, see http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov.

NASA will use the EtherDrive appliance in a disk-to-disk backup application for periodic backups and emergency retrieval.

Coraid’s SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage appliance provides direct network attachment (DNA) block storage that connects with servers via Ethernet connections. The 1U appliance can connect up to four serial-ATA disks with a maximum capacity of 2 terabytes of storage, and the 3U appliance offers as many as 15 disks or as much as 7.5 terabytes of storage.

DNA uses the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol that bypasses TCP/IP processing, eliminating the need for expensive network adapters. Disks inside the appliance can be assembled into RAID sets including RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and concatenated/linear combinations.

Since each EtherDrive Storage appliance has its own Gigabit Ethernet connections, storage system performance increases directly proportional to the number of appliances in the system, so there are no limits to how many disks can be attached to a single server. For more information, see www.coraid.com.