"iSCSI killer" Native in Linux

jar writes "First came Fibre Channel, then iSCSI. Now, for the increasingly popular idea of using a network to connect storage to servers, there's a third option called ATA over Ethernet (AoE). Upstart Linux developer and kernel contributor Coraid could use AoE shake up networked storage with a significantly less expensive way to do storage -- under $1 per Gigabyte. Linux Journal also has a full description of how AoE works." Note that the LJ article is from last year; the news story is more recent.

Comments

Re:Will it catch on?

[hpa]

So, it looks like the protocol has been officially registered and was granted approval by the IEEE--so that makes it an industry standard. It may not be adopted yet, but it's certainly not something like 802.11 pre-n or anything; there's an official and approved protocol.

Anyone can register a protocol number with IEEE by paying a $1000 fee. It doesn't mean it's a protocol endorsed by IEEE in any shape, way or form.

Re:Another "Killer"

[wasabii]

AoE is a networked block device technology. NFS and Samba are network file system. One is about making block level access to a device available over the network, the other is about making file operations available.

In the case of AoE, a single remote block device can be shared between multiple systems. Each client could issue it's own write/reads. in combination with a distributed file system, each node could mount the same FS.

It's the same as NBD, iSCSI, Shared SCSI, and Fiber Channel.

I just deployed an AoE SAN

[Tracy Reed]

AoE rocks. It is very easy to set up, way simpler than iSCSI or fibrechannel or any other SAN technology I have used. And it enabled us to have many more options for high availability or clustered filesystems (which we are not yet using but I have been following the progress of GFS and Lustre, learning towards Lustre). We did not buy the Coraid stuff but instead used vblade on our own disk machines. A disk node in our cluster has 4 300G SATA disks which we RAID 5, 512M RAM, and the cheapest CPU Intel currently makes. We have dual core Opterons with 4G of RAM each with no internal disk. They PXE boot and then mount root straight off the AoE. Then we run Xen on the Opteron boxes. This is the killer setup. We can migrate xen domains avoiding downtime for hardware maintenance and if a machines dies we can instantly restart it on another machine because it all runs off the AoE SAN.

So far I am very pleased. Just make sure you get hardware that can do jumbo frames as this will increase your performance by 50%.