Coraid Acquires Yunteq To Add Automation To Clouds

Yunteq is a developer of orchestration and management software that helps cloud providers and enterprises build policy-driven and automated infrastructure clouds.

Kevin Brown, CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based Coraid, said Yunteq built one of the first orchestration platforms for clouds. Instead of focusing on the compute level, which is where companies like VMware focus, Yunteq helps orchestrate resources across the entire cloud architecture.

With Palo Alto, Calif.-based Yunteq, Coraid will be able to help customers add an automation layer to their cloud-based storage and networking processes, Brown said.

"This gives us a new product set for customers looking at the cloud that will make it easier to layer a cloud on top of their existing infrastructure," he said. "Dozens, indeed hundreds, of regional providers are building a cloud, but don't have automation. We provide an automation layer around the storage and networking under the compute layer."

Yunteq's technology simplifies the building of clouds by automating many of the processes needed to tie together the different parts, Brown said. "It's hard to take the five vendors needed to build a cloud and build an automated offering," he said. "With us, you just need Coraid and an Ethernet network."

Coraid's acquisition of Yunteq has already closed, and integration of Yunteq's technology with that of Coraid is slated to be done in the first half of 2012. Brown declined to disclose the terms of the acquisition.

Coraid is a developer of Ethernet SAN technology based on the ATA over Ethernet protocol which allows any storage device connected to an Ethernet network to be seen as a c: drive by any users on the network without the need for SAN protocols.

"We use raw Ethernet for a SAN," Brown said. "There's no need for protocols. All storage looks like a c: drive. Also, there's no serial connection. It's all massively parallel. So a Coraid system with a price of under $600 per terabyte can exceed the performance of a $200,000 array from the big guys."

Coraid's Ethernet SAN storage technology is already being used in cloud applications, Brown said.

"The ATA over Ethernet protocol is built into the Linux kernel," he said. "And clouds are not built on Windows. They're built on Linux. If you want to build a cloud today, you need to compete against Amazon, and you need to add automation. We provide a turnkey solution to do that."