SAN CLEMENTE, Calif., 7 Dec. 2005. Coraid, Inc. today announced that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center has purchased its SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage appliance to back up critical data for its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) program.
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 uses the EtherDrive appliance in a disk-to-disk backup application for periodic backups and emergency retrieval, according to ADNET Systems' Jim Wiedman, system analyst for the SDO Ground System.
Using Arkeia backup software's restore feature, Wiedman is able to create a snapshot of critical data that he saves on a single EtherDrive disk, which he then removes and stores off site. If he ever needs to recover the data, Wiedman can retrieve the disk and insert it either back into the Coraid storage appliance or into any Linux server to read the data.
"This is a really nice feature, because our most critical data is always stored in a format we can retrieve. I'm so pleased with how well this is working that I'm planning to purchase additional SATA+RAID EtherDrive Storage appliances from Coraid," he said.
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 4 serial ATA disks with a maximum capacity of 2.0 terabytes of storage, and the 3U appliance offers up to 15 disks or 7.5 terabytes of storage, and since the storage is on the network, you can expand the storage capacity without limit.
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. Adding a new appliance to the storage system adds more processing power, which increases throughput and IOPS performance. As a result, there are no limits to how many disks can be attached to a single server.
Coraid designs and manufactures innovative, affordable networked storage appliances based on the "power of simple." Coraid also developed the open AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) protocol used by EtherDrive storage products that leverages the cost advantages of Ethernet to provide true networked storage. For more information, see www.coraid.com.
