Web Site Hosting Company Pleased with EtherDrive Storage Blades after Three Months

San Clemente, CA, February 8, 2005—Web Hosting and Email Service companies are part of the highly competitive Hosting industry. Finding low cost, high reliability solutions for data storage is key for service providers who store other companies' data.

ABHost, a business web hosting company based in Bellingham, WA has found just the right low cost and scalable storage solution they had been searching for. ABHost turned to Coraid Inc., maker of EtherDrive Storage Blades back in October as their means of storage expansion. Bert Bennett, Business Manager for ABHost says, "EtherDrive storage blades have been a simple, efficient and solid performing way for ABHost to expand its storage needs. I have found no comparable alternatives to EtherDrive—not with its ability to scale, and certainly not in cost. Besides EtherDrive's scalability, the product provides an elegant solution to allowing independent servers to share data storage."

ABHost utilizes a dual Apache server scheme, serving thousands of customer domains. One server on-line with a hot standby server connected via a heartbeat. If the on-line server goes down the standby server simply mounts the EtherDrive storage and the web hosting is maintained without a service outage. This configuration works well with EtherDrive Storage Blades as they are extremely flexible and can match any scheme. As far as data protection is concerned, ABHost uses a Linux RAID 5 configuration. "We are extremely pleased with how EtherDrive has performed in RAID 5, it provides us with peace of mind in knowing that our customer's data is available and protected," said Bennett.

ABHost provides hosting services to businesses that include web hosting and e-commerce solutions. ABHost serves over 13,000 domains worldwide and is continuing to grow. Future expansion of ABHost's storage pool will be done utilizing EtherDrive Storage Blades. ABHost started using EtherDrive because of the low cost. They continue using EtherDrive Storage Blades because of the simplicity, efficiency and performance.

Coraid's EtherDrive Storage Blades provide a low cost networked storage solution using Ethernet connections between the server and a shared storage array (pool). Multiple servers can access a common disk storage system eliminating wasted captive storage. This also allows servers to be sized to meet their application load, not by how much storage capacity they can hold. With EtherDrive Storage Blades, the storage pool can be expanded easily with simple Ethernet connections. Storage array performance is limited only by the number of disks configured for RAID stripping and the speed of the Ethernet connection at the server. EtherDrive Storage Blades are Direct Network Attached (DNA) block storage. DNA provides an Ethernet interface for hard disk drives. Coraid offers an optional EtherDrive RAIDBlade/20 Controller for users that don't want to use Linux software RAID.

About Coraid

Founded in 2000, Coraid is focused on developing, manufacturing, marketing and supporting innovative solutions for networked storage. The "power of simple" makes our storage products easier and more affordable for any server application. Coraid developed the Open Standards-based ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol which it has implemented into its EtherDrive storage blade products. This powerful and efficient protocol leverages the cost advantages of Ethernet to provide true networked storage. For more information please contact Coraid at 877-548-7200 and visit our web site at http://www.coraid.com.