Coraid snares Sony, launches locally

Beverley Head
Thursday, 10 November 2011 14:00

It probably didn't harm Jason Martin's profile with Ethernet storage business Coraid when he sold a 200 Terabyte system to Sony Music to be used to host Sony's online music assets in Australia. Indeed Coraid liked him so much that they hired the former distributor of their products and installed him as the company's first Australia and New Zealand country manager.

The decade old company which specialises in selling cheaper storage systems than Tier One suppliers such as IBM, HDS,  HP and EMC, has about 1,500 users signed up internationally - 25 of which are based in Australia and New Zealand. After receiving about $US85 million of fresh investment funding over the last two years, the company has been establishing international operations and engaged in a steep growth trajectory although it is still a loss making enterprise.

In an interview with iTWire, Carl Wright, executive vice president of worldwide sales for the company, said that over the last two years Coraid had grown revenues eightfold, and that they were now in the 'tens of millions.' Internationally the company has 107 employees.

Mr Wright said that the losses could be explained because the company was in a 'hypergrowth situation.' He said that the company's intent was to sell products that essentially; 'Commoditise storage so it becomes as ubiquitous as power and water...we don't want it to become a blocker.'

While the company sells systems directly to end users it also pitches its products as the foundations for third party storage clouds, and indeed two of Coraid's local dealers are offering Coraid based storage as a service offerings.

The challenge with storage clouds however can be less about the internals of the clouds themselves than getting to them, with bandwidth issues capable of throttling performance.

Mr Wright acknowledged that; 'ANZ has different bandwidth challenges to the US where bandwidth is basically free.' However he said he was aware of the advances being made in this area.