Coho Data, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California with R&D in Vancouver (Canada) and Cambridge (UK), emerged from stealth mode to introduce a new storage architecture that combines flash arrays for performance, COTS server hardware for scale-out sizing, and SDN intelligence.
coho Data, which was founded by key contributors to the Xen ecosystem, is taking a software-defined approach that combines commodity hardware with software that’s tuned for the latest PCIe flash technologies. The company said its team leveraged the experience of building the virtualization layer that powers Amazon’s EC2. The goal is an on-premise storage solution for data centers that delivers twice the price/performance of all-flash arrays. OpenFlow is used to embed storage intelligence in the network. A 2U Coho DataStream appliance provides Up to 180K IOPS and can be scaled linearly.
The Coho DataStream product line is currently installed in large enterprise private cloud environments and will be general available later this year.
Coho Data received initial funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
“As we saw with Nicira and networking, Coho Data is shaking up how storage has traditionally been delivered; instead of focusing on the storage hardware, it’s all about using software to extract the best performance from commodity hardware. I’m thrilled to work with the founding team, comprised of veteran product visionaries and architects, to usher in storage for the cloud generation,” stated Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner.
“Even as new advancements in flash memory have come on the scene, the storage industry has remained stagnant, relying on a 30 year old architecture to deliver performance and accessibility,” said Ramana Jonnala, CEO, Coho Data. “By redesigning the storage stack itself, we have taken the best ideas from public cloud-based architectures and improved them for demanding on-premise datacenters. DataStream uses sophisticated software to take advantage of flash in such a way that it can be used for all applications, not just the top tier ones. Whether data is in the public or private cloud, it should be on a storage architecture that can meet the scalability and performance today’s cloud generation companies need, at the pricing they demand.”
“We deliver services to a range of internal customers and require a storage solution that can provide cloud-level scale to help us manage the 12PBs of data and 4K VMs we currently have,” said Mario Angers, Systems Manager for University of British Columbia Central IT. “We’ve looked at lots of flash solutions, but they deliver performance that doesn’t scale. Coho DataStream is the first flash-tuned architecture we’ve seen that addresses scale and performance for our large VMware environment.”
