AoE
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
ATA over Ethernet seems to have hit Slashdot and del.icio.us. A company called Coraid is marketing disk shelves and Linux Journal has an article on-line about its inclusion in the kernel.
There are other network-based SAN technologies already out there. Last year I bought, for home use, a Netgear SC101, which uses an IP-SAN technology from Zetera. It's possibly less efficient than AoE because it uses IP rather than straight ethernet. It has its own file system rather than simply providing a connection to the raw disk. It does however claim the same flexibility and scalability as AoE promises.
As for the SC101 - it works as claimed. Its volumes appear as local disk (Windows only) and they can be shared, but its not much faster than any of the single disk NAS external disks available on the market. It is also very flakey over a wireless network.
posted by bj @ 8:47 am,
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