From Classic Coraid to
SouthSuite
Coraid, Inc. was founded as a company in 2000 by Brantley Coile. He
and a small team of developers worked on inventing the AoE protocol
and began selling their first storage appliances in 2005.
The startup was so scrappy, they assembled storage servers in an empty
airplane hangar at the Athens-Ben Epps Airport. Over the next few
years, they grew a solid customer base of Linux users, found beautiful
office space in downtown Athens, Georgia, and moved manufacturing into
an air conditioned warehouse.
The recession of 2008 was hard on everyone, and as the US economy
contracted and storage sales plummeted, Coraid, Inc. had a difficult
decision to make: lay off half the staff or seek venture funding.
They chose venture funding and leadership flew out to Silicon Valley.
By the end of 2009 Coraid, Inc. had completed a fully subscribed A
round.
This and the ensuing investment rounds came with an unexpected price,
however. The Silicon Valley culture—revenue growth over all
else—pushed the company away from its roots. As prices steadily rose,
the original core technology suffered.
By 2013, Brantley found the Valley’s system too toxic and stepped down
from his position as CTO and a year later had to leave the company
altogether. In early 2015, Coraid as a company closed its doors for
good and its foreclosure was completed in April 2015.
Although Coraid the company was no more, even with no one to be the
AoE standard-bearer, the Coraid line of storage appliances continued
to flourish and its users were just as active as they had always been.
Many of the 1,700 Coraid customers kept their AoE storage arrays in
production even without support.
Brantley Coile, who had since founded his fourth company, SouthSuite,
Inc., was given the opportunity to purchase the intellectual property
for Coraid’s original line of products. This was the original AoE
software technology that is now referred to as “classic Coraid.” Most
recently he has re-acquired the rights to the Coraid trademark.
So after 16 years and the death of a company, Coraid™ starts a new
chapter, this time as a SouthSuite, Inc.'s brand.