CORAID Announces $10 Million Series A Funding, New Executives

CORAID, a developer of scale-out storage with more than 1,100 customers worldwide, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series-A financing round with Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners to accelerate the development and adoption of the CORAID EtherDrive storage platform.

With this funding, the company has named multiple Silicon Valley veterans to its executive team, including: Kevin Brown as CEO, Audrey MacLean as chairman of the board, Carl Wright as executive vice president of worldwide sales, and Josh Leslie as vice president of channels and business development. Lara Druyan of Allegis Capital and Paul Weinstein of Azure Capital Partners have joined CORAID’s board of directors; Mark Leslie and Charles Giancarlo have joined the advisory board and invested in the company.

CORAID is redefining the fundamental economics of storage with its Ethernet-based solutions that provide enterprises of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance, scale-out storage. CORAID’s breakthrough EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market.

Using innovative software with 100-percent commodity hardware and raw Ethernet, EtherDrive storage arrays enable a scale-out SAN architecture that is ideally suited to dynamic virtualization and cloud environments. Starting at under $500 per terabyte and scaling to multiple petabytes, EtherDrive delivers a 5-8x price performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI solutions, while eliminating layers of complex SAN management.

This announcement coincides with the completion of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) deployment of CORAID’s EtherDrive solution in its storage network to support high-performance computing for the National Human Genome Research project. Located in Rockville, Maryland, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is leading a nationwide effort to coordinate and accelerate human genome research. NHGRI has deployed more than 400 terabytes of CORAID EtherDrive storage in multiple environments, including high-performance computing, primary storage, and backup. The EtherDrive installation supports applications including DNA sequencing, bio-informatics, and data reduction.