Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers, announced Coraid EtherDrive SAN Manager (ESM) 1.5, Coraid's newest management platform, which provides integration with VMware vCenter Server and Microsoft VSS and pools storage resources for simplified storage operations. Coraid's groundbreaking Ethernet SAN platform eliminates multiple layers of traditional SAN complexity, and ESM enables powerful automation in virtualized and cloud computing environments.

Coraid EtherDrive SAN Manager leverages the scale-out architecture of EtherDrive and the shared global namespace of Coraid's CorOS™ operating system to monitor and configure up to petabytes of storage as a pooled resource. With a graphical user interface and native REST APIs for all functions, administrators gain visibility and control over their entire storage network. This uniquely enables administrators to deliver storage as an on-demand utility for a wide variety of application environments across their organizations.

"Modern data centers are moving to automated cloud architectures, but they can't get there with legacy storage. Coraid's scale-out platform builds simplicity and performance into the network and storage arrays, and our new EtherDrive SAN Manager ties them together with automation and visibility across all resources," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "Managing petabytes of shared storage is now as simple as managing local disk."

"For a modern web architecture supporting 600 software releases a month and more than 1PB of storage, automation, simplicity and performance of our storage systems are crucial," said Chris Fischer, director of web and IT operations at Shutterstock Images, the world's largest subscription-based stock photo agency. "Coraid's plug-and-play model, integration with open-source components, and programmatic interfaces will help us optimize our day-to-day processes, enabling us to focus on innovation and execution. Scaling becomes simple."

EtherDrive SAN Manager includes the Coraid ESM for vCenter Plug-in, which provides VMware administrators visibility and control over virtual machine storage, including virtual machine-to-storage mappings and the coordination and scheduling of array snapshots for data protection. The platform also includes Microsoft VSS integration to communicate with Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Hyper-V to quiesce applications before storage snapshots, ensuring data consistency.

"We use Coraid EtherDrive to support our rapidly growing cloud infrastructure because of its excellent price-performance and scale-out architecture," said Matt Krokosz, CTO at Pac-West Telecomm, a provider of wholesale advanced telecommunications services. "Now with EtherDrive SAN Manager, we will be able to streamline our operations even further, reducing operating costs and focusing our staff on higher-value activities."

Coraid is a Gold Sponsor of VMworld 2011 and will be demonstrating these new products in booth 1007. The products will be available in the fourth quarter. To learn more about Coraid's new management offerings, visit www.coraid.com/products/management.