REDWOOD CITY, CA, Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions, announced that it has closed a $50 million investment round led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners and affiliates of Silver Lake, as well as new investors including Seagate Technology and Kinetic Ventures.

The company also announced that it has surpassed 1,500 customers in 45 countries, marking Coraid as one of the fastest-growing vendors in the enterprise data storage industry. With this new round of financing, Coraid will expand global operations and accelerate innovation in storage and cloud orchestration.

"In the era of big data, virtualization and cloud computing, the $30 billion data storage industry is ripe for disruption. Coraid has cracked the code on delivering unmatched price-performance and simplicity, and they've proven this value with more than 1,500 customers," said Jim McLean, partner at Crosslink Capital. "More importantly, Coraid has developed a uniquely elastic and automated storage architecture that can replace multiple tiers of legacy storage. We're extremely pleased to join the team."

Coraid EtherDrive® storage arrays harness the power of massively parallel Ethernet and the scale-out CorOS™ operating system to deliver faster performance than Fibre Channel, at about one-fifth the cost. EtherDrive storage arrays can be deployed in less than 60 seconds and present themselves to servers as direct-attached storage. Coraid recently announced the acquisition of cloud orchestration software vendor Yunteq™ to enable policy-based automation of storage, networks, and security for public and private clouds.

The company is also taking advantage of major performance improvements in flash storage. At VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, Coraid unveiled its EtherFlash™ solution, which delivers extreme performance of nearly 200,000 IOPS per shelf using standard solid state drives (SSDs), starting at under $10/GB. In contrast to specialty flash storage arrays, Coraid's platform gives enterprise customers total flexibility to mix and match SSD, SAS, and SATA drives to meet a wide variety of workload requirements.

"Coraid has pioneered a critical new category of storage - Ethernet SAN - and we are very optimistic about this next phase of expansion for the company," said John Jarve, general partner at Menlo Ventures. "We see a massive pain point in the market as customers struggle to handle data growth with aging storage technologies. Coraid is defining the next generation of scale-out virtualized storage."

"Legacy storage architectures are the number-one roadblock to virtualization and cloud computing, and Ethernet SAN is uniquely positioned to break through that roadblock," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid.

"Coraid is passionate about helping customers worldwide gain control of data growth, while driving complexity and cost out of their IT operations. Adding $50 million in funding and experienced new investors to our team will help us accelerate this mission," said Audrey MacLean, Coraid’s chairman.