Last week I had a briefing with Kevin Brown (CEO) and Peter Godden (EMEA Director) of Coraid about a new product released on 17th of July. We hveve already written about them in the past but, once again, they surprised me with their numbers.
Two words about the products
The product is a NAS for their storage. I haven’t got a lot to say about it: it’s a standard ZFS based NAS head named ZX.
Actually you can get all the information from their website, it’s a very standard Solaris based ZFS NAS head. They decided to propose such an appliance because the advantages derived from ZFS in terms of filesystem capabilities and resiliency in big NFS installations.
The only curious thing here is that, contrary to many of their competitors, they have chosen to go with the “Original” Oracle Solaris instead of Illumos/Nexenta. I’m not sure if they made their decision because neighborhood relations with Oracle (their offices overlook the same small lake in redwood city) or because they want to avoid a lawsuit… But, more or less, ZFS is ZFS and I’m sure that it’s not difficult for them to deploy a Nexenta-like NAS if a customer asks for it.
The numbers
Well, this time too they’ve shown a new impressive and steady growth: a 2/3X annual growth with 1500+ customers in more than 45 countries, big (at the Petabyte scale) installations on well known customers and new case histories to show!!!
This is a relatively small, but very well founded, startup that is doing very well, especially when the configurations get big.
Bottom line
I’ve already said that: Coraid hasn’t got the best products in terms of functionalities and AoE is the “unnecessary” protocol in the storage industry but, on the other hand, they are very hard to beat when we talk in terms of price, performance and ease of deployment in large installations. And this is not only a technology issue: the company is showing a simple clear strategy and good execution too.
