Coraid closes $50 million Series C funding

Is Coraid pioneering a new industry standard in data storage?

Tech manufacturing company Coraid, known for its computer data storage products, announced Thursday that it has closed a $50 million Series C round of funding led by Crosslink Capital. Coraid's current investors, including partners in the previous $25 million round of funding in November 2010, participated in this C Round.

Coraid is a developer of Ethernet SAN technology, using an ATA-over-Ethernet protocol, as opposed to the Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols.  The result is a platform that provides the resources for companies looking to make the move into virtualization and cloud computing.  Coraid's customers include companies in a number of different sectors, including manufacturing, life sciences, software services, healthcare, education, financial services, government agencies, military organizations, and hosting.

"EtherDrive’s connectionless, parallel design ensures performance scales linearly as additional SAN Storage is added to the network without the bottlenecks of legacy controller-based architectures," the company explains on its website.

What this means is that Coraid's data storage service sets a new industry standard for closed-system data storage. Its Ethernet SAN tech "deliver(s) faster performance than Fibre Channel, at about one-fifth the cost," according to the company's press release.

"Coraid has a tremendous opportunity to disrupt the storage market, and fundamentally redefine storage economics... Coraid's innovative Ethernet SAN platform is already changing this equation," said John W. Jarve of Menlo Ventures, Coraid's biggest Series B investor, in a statement. Jarve now sits on the board at Coraid.

Concurrent with the announcement of its funding, Coraid boasted 1500 customers in 45 countries, making it "one of the fastest-growing vendors in the enterprise data storage industry," by the company's admission. 

Coraid also recently acquired the cloud orchestration software maker Yunteq, a San Mateo-based start-up, indicating a decisive move into cloud computing and virtualization.

“Legacy storage architectures [like Fibre Channel] are the number-one roadblock to virtualization and cloud computing, and Ethernet SAN is uniquely positioned to break through that roadblock,” said Coraid CEO Kevin Brown, in a statement.