CoRAID is No More
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Low end and social media pariah CoRAID has officially folded and gone under. The market knew this last year but CoRAID had attempted to hide this fact until recently. Now they have officially announced that the company is no more.
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Good riddance. Those guys were crooks. They only kept customers by threatening to sue anyone who talked about problems with their products and promoting senseless protocols that had no other vendors to support them. Their products were horrible and I've never seen one purchased by someone without something to gain or completely not understanding what they had purchased. They had a social media presence and it really showed how evil they were. It was unthinkable that someone would have been willing to voluntarily be their customer.
@John-Nicholson @KOOLER and I were warning people about them for years. At least we are safe from them now. Of course, now they are making a new company. I hope no one is foolish enough to fall for that scam again. Dishonest people are just dishonest people.
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Since there is no vendor at all, anymore, that supports ATAoE, the "doom and gloom" scenario that everyone poo-poo'd has come to pass. Not only that, CoRAID faked that they were still in business for most of a year. What have their customers been doing during that time? And why hasn't a single customer anywhere come forward to complain that their support, upgrades, etc. was all gone?
I'm guessing either all of their customers were fake, they were all threatened with gag orders or they all moved on and were to embarrassed to admit that they had been duped by these guys.
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So the CoRAID founder let all his people go, let the company fail and now has a new start up called South Suite Software making.... the same products again.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brantleycoile
South Suite Software is a new company to create easy to deploy, scaleable, hyper-efficient software appliances for the Linux community. First product will be ReST configurable ATA-over-Ethernet storage software that turns white-boxes into a powerful and scaleable server side storage appliances.
Let me tell you, right now, if you do business with this company knowing the problems with the protocol, the problems with using an industry unsupported protocol, the history of how these guys treat their customers, the history of the threats and what happened to the last people who were foolish enough to use these products... you are an idiot. I want this stated before these products are on the market so later, when people are using them and having issues and being threatened and get left without support, we can point to the fact that this is not hindsight, but years and years of demonstrating the problems with CoRAID and now we have more than enough knowledge to know that using this new CoRAID replacement is just idiotic.
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How have I never even heard of CoRAID?
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@thecreativeone91 said:
How have I never even heard of CoRAID?
That's quite surprising. They made quite a name for themselves thanks to wildly inappropriate behaviour on some other communities.
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I searched for it. What I found funny is that these people that actually used it on SW. 1.) had very little posts. 2.) said how nice this product was and how much they liked it (at $50,000+) compared to their own Equallogic SANs in most cases.
Now, Why would you compare it to one of the lowest end SANs out there.. when if you want to promote something like this has highend you should compared to a properly deployed EMC SAN.
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CoRAID was the "other" ProxMox that artificially filled the community with employees pretending to be end users trying to convince people that the product was viable.
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@scottalanmiller said:
CoRAID was the "other" ProxMox that artificially filled the community with employees pretending to be end users trying to convince people that the product was viable.
Fitting:
Youtube Video -
I've heard the rumors about these guys but never had to deal with them directly. They had a good marketing message but the whole "using their own protocol" thing never felt like a really good idea. And the price was never good enough to make it worth overlooking that shortcoming.
Doesn't sound like a big loss.
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I fully agree with you guys on how bad Coraid have manage their end and the fact it is a shame for end users, partners...
RIP Coraid but long life to the OpenAoE community, I strongly think that AoE has not died with Coraid and it is just the beginning of a new story :
http://www.openaoe.org/
https://github.com/OpenAoEOther thread on the same topic :
http://mangolassi.it/topic/4932/in-wake-of-coraid-demise-will-open-aoe-rise/2 -
@Yacine-Kheddache said:
RIP Coraid but long life to the OpenAoE community, I strongly think that AoE has not died with Coraid and it is just the beginning of a new story :
It is going to be a tough road for them. But without CoRAID undermining the protocol, it certainly has a much better chance now than it did before.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Yacine-Kheddache said:
RIP Coraid but long life to the OpenAoE community, I strongly think that AoE has not died with Coraid and it is just the beginning of a new story :
It is going to be a tough road for them. But without CoRAID undermining the protocol, it certainly has a much better chance now than it did before.
Yep and this is the new challenge but AoE lovers are already behind the community and only for the best
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@scottalanmiller Were you a customer of Coraid? If so when did you buy? Did you deal directly with Coraid or thru a reseller?
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@jjjjkemp said:
@scottalanmiller Were you a customer of Coraid? If so when did you buy? Did you deal directly with Coraid or thru a reseller?
No, thankfully I was exposed to them in another online community and saw enough of them that I knew never to do business with them. I've spoken to them a bit as they reached out to me and wanted me to try their product. I work with many full time storage professionals with enough knowledge of and experience with their products to know that there was no need to test it. Their problems were not in the technology itself (at least not primarily) but in the kind of company that they were and the poor products that they were making.
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@mlnews With the foreclosure of Coraid Inc., EtherDrive users can now build these storage appliances at a small fraction of the cost by installing the software in a SuperMicro multi-disk server. Seehttp://www.etherdrive.com
Build a petabye of simple, scalable, fast storage for less than $75,000. -
@jjjjkemp said:
@mlnews With the foreclosure of Coraid Inc., EtherDrive users can now build these storage appliances at a small fraction of the cost by installing the software in a SuperMicro multi-disk server. Seehttp://www.etherdrive.com
Build a petabye of simple, scalable, fast storage for less than $75,000.@jjjjkemp you should state your relationship to etherdrive... Otherwise its just misleading.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@jjjjkemp said:
@mlnews With the foreclosure of Coraid Inc., EtherDrive users can now build these storage appliances at a small fraction of the cost by installing the software in a SuperMicro multi-disk server. Seehttp://www.etherdrive.com
Build a petabye of simple, scalable, fast storage for less than $75,000.@jjjjkemp you should state your relationship to etherdrive... Otherwise its just misleading.
It's confusing how that information is displayed. My guess is he thought that it was public on his profile. I'll IM him and show him what to do.
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I have known Brantley Coile for almost 30 years. He is a most uniquely insightful and talented software engineer. Characterizing him as "evil" is grossly unfair and untrue. The AoE protocol has a proven record of reliability with more than 10 years of data storage usage. It is simpler, faster and less expensive than Fiber Channel or iSCSI.
Brantley Coile, the founder of Coraid, invented the AoE storage protocol as a simpler way to build a SAN with common Ethernet. The AoE storage protocol was published and available for use free of charge in 2004. The AoE driver was given to the Linux kernel in 2005, and a free target implementation was also made available free (vblade). Coraid launched it's EtherDrive Storage Appliance product line focused at the Linux storage market. The company grew and enhanced it's simple storage appliance product line. AoE is the reason the appliance's were so simple, and fast, and reliable. Coraid grew from nothing for 5 years, then sought VC funding in 2009 to address a larger market. Upon closing the Series A round, VC's took control of the company, and its management. The founders (Brantley Coile, and others) were no longer calling the shots or setting the direction of product development. Many poor decisions were made, and millions of dollars wasted. The Coraid sales force fell in love with ZFS and Solaris and ignored the EtherDrive SRX appliances. Coraid started reselling Oracle/Solaris licensed servers, while engaging in a desperate attempt to get Open Solaris to a supportable product. They put all resources into this plan, but did not have the engineering team to execute the plan.
On April 15, 2015, Coraid Inc. was foreclosed, and all assets and intellectual property became the property of the primary debt holder. On May 8, 2015, the intellectual property, copyrights and trademark for EtherDrive SRX and VSX storage appliances were purchased by The Brantley Coile Company. The Brantley Coile Company announced that the software for SRX and VSX are now open source and available from the website www.etherdrive.com. Supported software licenses are also available and development of AoE products will continue.
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Going with VCs is a dangerous road. Not the first company that I've seen that was going strong try to make some money that route and find that all the company's original values were gone and there was nothing more to be done.
