Today Coraid Inc. acquired cloud orchestration company Yunteq Inc. and plans to use the technology from the startup to accelerate its plans to build Ethernet storage-area networks (SANs) for public cloud storage providers.
John Gilmartin, Coraid’s vice president of product marketing, said the vendor will use the Yunteq software with its ATA over Ethernet (AoE)-based EtherDrive SANs beginning in the first half of 2012. The software is targeted at providers looking to build public storage clouds based on Coraid systems. Yunteq’s YunController Suite of cloud orchestration and management software provides features such as multi-tenancy, a RESTful API and policy-driven control over cloud infrastructure resources.
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What we’ve been planning for is to build out orchestration capabilities on top of this very simple architecture. What we recognized is that Yunteq has made tremendous strides in that orchestration market.
John Gilmartin, Coraid’s vice president of product marketing
Coraid didn't disclose the price it paid for Yunteq.
Coraid will initially target existing customers and cloud providers building large-scale architectures, including traditional hosting companies and IT outsourcing organizations that plan to compete with services such as Amazon’s S3 public storage cloud. Over time, Gilmartin said, the vendor will also pursue enterprise customers who want to build their own private clouds and hybrid clouds.
He said Yunteq software will help cloud providers automatically provision storage capacity on the Coraid storage array and secure virtual networks, making it easier to add customers to their clouds.
“You can free administrators from doing traditionally manual tasks and having to have a lot of deep knowledge about all of the ins and outs of the infrastructure, and allow them to make high-level policy decisions that can then be automated across very large-scale architectures,” Gilmartin said.
Coraid has been aiming for cloud providers for more than a year. It added a RESTful storage management interface enabling automation and scripting to its EtherDrive systems in August 2010. Gilmartin said Coraid was planning to add an orchestration layer, and believes the Yunteq acquisition will speed up that process considerably.
“What we’ve been planning for is to build out orchestration capabilities on top of this very simple architecture,” he explained. “What we recognized is that Yunteq has made tremendous strides in that orchestration market.”
Mark Peters, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said the software can enable Coraid to offer a simple storage back end with a sophisticated orchestration and management tool. “The way we currently do storage has to change,” Peters said. “We just have too much complexity.”
Yunteq identified Carpathia Hosting, a Dulles, Va.-based managed hosting service provider, as its first publicly acknowledged customer in July 2010. “They’re not just buying a garage and three people,” Peters said. “They’re getting something that works.”
This article was previously published on SearchCloudStorage.com.