[HH] AoE controller

[Bill Bogstad]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I first heard about ATA over Ethernet[1] (AoE) my thought was that
> this could be a really interesting technology if you could get low costs
> adapters to stick on drives and then string an arbitrary number of
> drives together via Ethernet.

Haven't thought about AoE in a long time.

>...
> Any thoughts on how this could be done easier? Whether it makes sense?

What are your use cases?   Unless you go with 10Gbit Ethernet (fairly
pricey host adapters & switches), you aren't going to have the same
burst speed as current SATA/SAS interfaces.   The drives already come
with SATA on-board and multi-port (8 device) host adapters are pretty
cheap as well.   If that isn't enough,
apparently you can get SATA/SAS multiplexers which have decent fanouts
(1:8?).    One upside I could see to AoE would be that you could place
the drives fairly far away from the host systems whereas SATA/SAS is
likely to restrict you to the same rack or perhaps the same room.
Your point about arbitrary numbers of drives might matter if you want
truly large amounts of data accessible from a single system and don't
care too much about how fast you can get to it ("cold" data).  OTOH,
do you really need direct access to every drive?   Why not do some
aggregation and serve it up as either  large RAIDed disks or maybe as
a networked file server rather then seeing each drive directly?

Bill Bogstad