Ethernet SAN vendor Coraid announced a new family of products today that offers more scalability and more throughput to accommodate not only traditional workloads but also video and unstructured data.

The Coraid ZX-Series NAS servers run the Solaris ZFS file system and pack a lot in one pitch. A ZX can be natively integrated with EtherDrive arrays over Ethernet to create a multi-petabyte shared pool, and there’s built-in diagnosis that displays real-time performance. This is designed to facilitate better monitoring, and if need be, carry out optimizations to keep everything as efficient as possible.

There are a number of other built-in capabilities including data, dedupe and in-line compression, as well as file-based replication, snapshots and cloning. There’s an active-active cluster option for high availability and the ZX series also automatically sets storage hierarchy in hybrid environments that include DRAM, flash cache and HDDs.

Last but not least, Coraid says that its new offering supports data sharing between Windows, Linux and UNIX instances.

“Our research confirms that scale-out storage designs built on Ethernet align well with the evolving architecture of the virtualized data center,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. “Functions such as hybrid storage pools, data deduplication and compression optimize storage utilization, thus reducing acquisition costs and improving total cost of ownership (TCO).”

One of the primary perks of the unified storage solution is the fact that it can connect to EtherDrive. Earlier this year Coraid entered into an agreement with backup solutions maker Veeam to run its software on these arrays in order to achieve greater cost efficiency.  Veeam Backup & Replication works with both vSphere and Hyper-V, offering a fairly high price/performance ratio across both hypervisors when coupled with EtherDrive. Here’s the full story on that update.