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Coraid ZX4000 NAS Appliance

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Coraid Inc
Company Description: Coraid redefines storage with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive and EtherCloud solutions. Coraid delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and an elastic storage architecture to handle massive data growth. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud architectures, Coraid's platform has been deployed by thousands of companies worldwide.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Hardware - Storage

Nomination Title: Coraid ZX4000 NAS Appliance

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Coraid ZX4000 is a file storage appliance with a unique architecture that allows customers to create a potentially limitless pool of elastic, shared storage that can scale across different physical locations. Coraid ZX4000 offers significantly better performance for a wide variety of workloads and the ability to scale storage infrastructure as needed more simply as compared to existing networked attached storage solutions.

What makes this product stand out from its competitors?

1. Massively parallel Ethernet versus dedicated strings.
• ZX4000: The use of Layer 2 Ethernet to connect storage shelves to Coraid ZX4000 appliances allows sharing of storage capacity across any number of ZX4000 appliances eliminating data silos.
• Legacy NAS: Has to dedicate entire strings to different Operating System and Virtualisation environments creating storage silos and leading to over provisioning of storage resources.

2. Scale-out for additional capacity and performance versus forklifting in replacement gear.
• ZX4000: Scaling a ZX4000 system is as simple as adding more ZX4000 appliances for throughput, more drive shelves for capacity, or more flash drives for performance in parallel.
• Legacy NAS: Scaling typically requires adding a new string with controller and drives or a forklift upgrade of the existing controller with a more powerful controller.

3. Overcomes scalability limitations such as topology and distance as seen by legacy NAS.
• ZX4000: Unique Ethernet backbone overcomes distance limitations typically seen in cluster, HA, datacentre, and even service provider configurations by allowing stretch cluster configurations over many miles.
• Legacy NAS: Local clusters limited to a few feet (length of a standard SAS cable). Metro clusters possible only with complex mirroring and replication configurations.

4. Reduces storage by 32% or more without impacting application performance
• ZX4000: Lab tests show that the ZX4000 reduces the amount of storage needed by around 50% in most environments without compromising application or storage performance.
• Legacy NAS: Focus on a stringent set of conditions, including mandatory professional services, to attain around a 50% reduction. As deduplication involves both reduction and ‘re-hydration’ penalties when the data is needed by an application, performance impacts may be felt by applications and end users.

5. Better resilience with 80% storage efficiency
• ZX4000: The ZX4000’s highly resilient, cloud-compatible architecture includes various data protection options to effortlessly safeguard against the failure of 3 entire shelves from a hardware perspective and 3 disk drive failures from a data integrity perspective. Even with this level of protection in worldwide configurations, storage efficiency is still high at around 80%.
• Legacy NAS: Typically utilize 1:1 replication with complex mirroring to protect against 3 shelf or drive failures, resulting in poor storage efficiency.

6. Faster performance in customer environments due to tuning options
• ZX4000: ZX4000 has a rich set of tuning options including separate read and write caches to enable high performance especially for mixed workloads. Tuning parameters such as block size enable optimization across multiple scenarios. Selectable compression options enable trade-off between application and storage performance.
• Legacy NAS: Usually hardcoded to split cache 50/50 between read and write. Read throughput is not guaranteed since mixed workloads often cause hiccups. Fixed block size optimised for deduplication only.

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Dave Kresse is a seasoned executive with more than fifteen years of executive experience in the technology industry, most recently as CEO of application performance and security vendor Mu Dynamics, which was acquired by Spirent. Dave also holds a board seat as an independent director at Embrane, the software-defined network services company. Prior to Mu Dynamics, Dave served as Vice President and General Manager of the NetApp storage management and application integration business, where he drove rapid revenue growth and led the first solution integration effort between NetApp and VMware.

Dave holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in human biology from Stanford University and a Master of Business Administration degree with distinction from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.