Coraid Offers Low-Cost Virtualized Storage Solutions


Company:

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: EtherDrive

Year Founded: 2000, first product available in 2005

Sponsored post

Number of Channel Partners: 35

Ideal Channel Partner: Volume-Oriented Reseller Partner

Why You Should Care: Coraid is aiming to leverage low cost-for-performance technology and a new focus on virtualization to attract more partners and customers.

The Lowdown: Coraid knows that it's difficult to bring a new brand to market, but it also knows that in this economy money talks, which is why the storage vendor feels its differentiation will be its lower total cost of ownership to customers.

"We have a very simple value proposition: the best price performance in the industry," said Josh Leslie, Coraid vice president of channels. "We can deliver performance as fast as Fibre Channel at a fraction of the cost."

EtherDrive Cluster

Coraid's EtherDrive can help reduce the cost of shared storage by 30 percent to 60 percent of a project's total cost down to 15 percent, Leslie said.

The SR-Series SAN arrays can support 3.5-inch SATA drives and include two 1-Gb Ethernet ports. The SRX-series supports SATA/SAS/SSD drives and supports up to six 1-Gb Ethernet ports or four 10-Gb Ethernet ports.

"We think the technology is very disruptive. There is no customer size that won't benefit from our technology," he said. "We understand that higher customers are more likely to go to an established brand. But those Fortune 50 companies have lots of storage projects and you go into any company and they have 10 or 15 vendors in there."

In the past five years, Coraid amassed 200 informal partner and 1,100 customers with effectively no sales and marketing or structured channel program, Leslie said. Now the company has formalized its program and has reduced the number of certified partners to 35, a number it wants to increase, he said.

"We've reached out to all those [200] folks. We think we have a lot to offer to partners, but we've asked them for some requirements, technical training and revenue commitment each quarter. We want quality over quantity at this point," he said.

Coraid plans to offer standard marketing support, lead generation activities and deal registration to partners, Leslie said.

"We're not reinventing the wheel. I spent the last six years at VMware [before joining Coraid in December 2009]. We all have collectively worked in channel-centric businesses and we did a thorough analysis of what is out there," he said.

Coraid received $10 million in funding in January and the board brought in new executives to help drive the company's growth, including new CEO Kevin Brown, who was president and CEO of Kidaro, a desktop virtualization software developer acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

"It's really an evolution, not a restart," Leslie said. "The first five years, we did Linux only. We were very successful in that space but we've changed the direction of the company, specifically to support virtualization environments. That's what made our founder realize he wasn't playing in a $200 million market anymore but in a $30 billion market."

The new management is also seeking to engage more with solution providers.

"The single most important thing we have is a channel-ready product. The channel knows how to sell storage and this [EtherDrive] is simple to install, use and sell," Leslie said. "Start with a channel-ready product and partners that have been successful on their own. Introduce a supporting mechanism with a partner portal, access to leads, access to all our technical documentation, access to salespeople, a deal registration program. At the end of the day, you have a product that can help win deals."

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