Coraid announced the introduction of the AoE driver for VMware's ESX hypervisor. This kernel driver enables VMware ESX servers to access and share very low cost AoE-based SAN storage. Coraid's line of EtherDrive storage products use proven AoE technology to provide more affordable, reliable and massively scalable RAID storage systems.

Coraid's new initiator uses AoE, a fast and reliable alternative to iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN technologies. For more than four years the AoE driver has been standard in the 2.6 Linux kernel making AoE storage a popular choices for high performance Linux virtualization environments in datacenters around the world.

"By enabling ESX servers to work natively with AoE storage, VMWare users now have access to a SAN storage choice that other virtualization environments are already enjoying," said James Kemp, CEO of Coraid. "Fast SAN storage is essential for taking advantage of ESX features like VMotion, and Coraid's EtherDrive products can support these features in a uniquely affordable way. By adding Coraid's storage virtualization appliance to the SAN and a cluster filesystems like VMFS you maximize storage flexibility and data protection."

Coraid's AoE storage products use standard Ethernet combined with the open AoE storage protocol to deliver the fastest, lowest cost and most scalable networked storage available. AoE eliminates the complexities and high costs typically associated with iSCSI or Fibre Channel systems by removing the need for expensive ToE (TCP/IP off-load Engine) cards or HBAs (Host Bus Adapters). Instead, AoE allows disks to be shared on a network to create highly scalable virtualized storage at the lowest possible storage price. For example Coraid's SR2421 EtherDrive RAID Storage with 1TB disks can build out AoE-based shared SAN storage for less than fifty cents per GigaByte (<$500/TB) and Coraid's LD2461 and SR2461 EtherDrive RAID Storage systems are faster than iSCSI or FibreChannel, achieving performance of more than 500 MB per seconds over 10 Gigabit Ethernet.