Coraid announced that Sony Music Australia, Australia's largest integrated music company and provider of a wide range of digital music consumer services, has deployed Coraid EtherDrive storage to power its online Australian website Bandit.fm, a high volume, online, digital music delivery system. By unifying its massive library of music onto one, easy-to-use, high-performance storage solution, Sony Music Australia can keep pace with growing demand for its music while ensuring high availability and data protection.

Sony Music Australia previously hosted its music on a leading NAS platform but was looking for a better way to grow capacity and lower operating expenses. It was essential that any new solution be able to scale to multiple petabytes. Sony Music Australia hosts over 5 million tracks today and anticipates needing to nearly quadruple its capacity to support continued aggressive growth in music titles and user base, as well as to support a second site for backup and high availability.

Since deploying the Coraid EtherDrive storage systems, Sony Music Australia has been impressed with the solution's ease of use, performance and reliability. Dustin McClung, Vice President, IS&T Asia Pacific, said, "We wanted to build an infrastructure that would enable us to provide the ultimate experience for consumers. We needed a high-performance system that would replace our existing NAS storage system as well as scale and give us room to grow. We considered other storage systems, but only Coraid offered a scale-out architecture that would allow us to simply add capacity and performance as needed. The Coraid EtherDrive solution not only met our price, performance and density requirements but also provided the data protection we were looking for."

Coraid EtherDrive solutions provide enterprises of all sizes with flexible, high-performance storage while eliminating the complexity of traditional SAN solutions. Using an innovative scale-out SAN architecture and standard Ethernet, Coraid EtherDrive storage arrays provide lower OPEX and a five-to-eight times price-performance advantage over legacy storage. EtherDrive is ideally suited to dynamic high-performance computing, virtualization, video and cloud computing environments.

Coraid leverages standard Ethernet and the CorOS distributed storage operating system to deliver higher performance than Fibre Channel at up to 1800 MB/s of throughput or nearly 200,000 IOPS per array using low-cost, industry-standard hardware. EtherDrive scales to multiple petabytes with a flat Ethernet SAN topology and connectionless, massively parallel design. Deployment and configuration of EtherDrive are simple; a host can configure and address new storage in under 60 seconds. The scale-out design also enables a Zero-Hour Support customer service offering based on Coraid's disk portability technology, which allows users to swap drives between arrays for upgrades, service reconfiguration, data transfers or disaster recovery on the fly.