November 02, 2010 06:00 ET

NASA Funded Experiment Selects Coraid for Its Antarctic Mission

Coraid's Performance, Reliability and Simplicity Essential in Collecting Mission Critical Data

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - November 2, 2010) -  Coraid® Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,200 customers worldwide, today announced that The EBEX Balloon-Borne experiment, which is funded by NASA, selected Coraid's platform to protect sensitive data collected during high altitude flights over Antarctica. Coraid's CorOS® is able to perform under extreme weather conditions, reliable enough that it can secure data on computers during test flights and simple enough that the scientists can manage the storage themselves. The EBEX experiment aims to collect several terabytes of data over a two week period as it studies information on cosmic microwaves that originate from the Big Bang. The goal is to gather more detailed information about the beginning of the universe. 

The EBEX experiment, which weighs three tons, is lifted aloft by a giant helium balloon 100 meters in diameter and will travel 120,000 feet into the air over Antarctica in December 2011. The project is intended to collect massive amounts of data relating to minute differences in microwaves arriving from space to the Earth's uppermost atmosphere. These microwaves represent the universe a split second after the Big Bang and give scientists a unique look into the beginning of the universe.

A high level of redundancy is required for this project. The researchers needed a flexible, distributed storage solution for this experiment and did not want the data disks directly attached to a single computer. Rather they preferred an Ethernet-based solution so the data was centralized. For this reason, the experiment implements two redundant computers on board the balloon that share information and several terabytes of data is protected by Coraid's storage solution. Coraid's platform allows multiple computers to use the same disk. Both computers are also able to choose which disk to use at any specific moment based on different conditions. 

The team of scientists completed a 15-hour test flight over the Arizona dessert in mid 2009 and the instrumentation, computers and storage were unscathed during the test flight. "The key in an experiment like this is redundancy, resiliency and reliability," stated Professor Shaul Hanany of the University of Minnesota, principal investigator of EBEX. "The conditions faced during this experiment are hard on the equipment. Coraid's platform provides us with a reliable solution without sacrificing performance. In addition, the simple management of Coraid's solution ensures there is no interruption in gathering and protecting our data," said Dr. Lorne Levinson, research scientist at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who was in charge of designing the data storage system.

"This environment is as extreme as it gets," said Carl Wright, executive vice president of sales and product management at Coraid. "Hovering more than one hundred thousand feet above the South Pole is certainly not typical, but the need for reliable storage is universal. We're excited to be part of history being made and will continue to support NASA and its important research."

About Coraid
Coraid redefines storage economics with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive storage solutions. EtherDrive delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy storage. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud architectures, Coraid solutions have been deployed by more than 1,200 customers worldwide. For more information, visit www.coraid.com or follow Coraid on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Coraid_Inc or LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/companies/769557. 

Coraid and EtherDrive are registered trademarks of Coraid, Inc. CorOS is a trademark of Coraid, Inc. All other marks referenced are the property of their respective owners.