NAS device uses innovative "AoE" protocol, supports Linux, BSD

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May 09, 2005

Coraid is shipping a new SATA (serial ATA) compatible version of its inexpensive SAN (storage attached network) device for Linux and BSD servers. The EtherDrive uses ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), an open protocol developed by Coraid and merged into the Linux kernel in January.

(Click for larger view of EtherDrive SATA)

Coraid launched its first EtherDrive product in June of last year. The original EtherDrive supported IDE (PATA) drives, and targeted "cost-sensitive early adopters," according to the company. Company founder Jim Kemp said at the time, "Fiber channel networking was chosen over Ethernet in the early days of SAN technology, because at 10Mbps, Ethernet was deemed too slow. Since then, Ethernet has actually become faster than fiber channel. There was a lapse of memory for a decade here, as people built an industry around fiber channel."

Coraid says its new EtherDrive device offers pricing as low as $1.32/GB, throughputs up to 200MB/sec for a single shelf, and scalability limited "only by available rackspace." EtherDrive Storage Blades appear to servers on the network as locally attached disks, and can be assembled into large RAID sets and storage volumes, according to Coraid.

An AoE driver for the 2.4 kernel was submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list in April of 2004, and a 2.6 AoE driver was merged into the mainstream 2.6.11 kernel in January of this year. Open source aoetools are also available for Linux. AoE drivers and utilities are also available for BSD.

Coraid says early customers include scientific and government agencies such as the NSC (National Supercomputer Center), the USGS (US Geological Survey), and NASA, as well as budget Web hosting provider Hostway.

Additional details about AoE, and Coraid's EtherDrive, can be found here.

Availability

A 15-drive SATA EtherDrive Storage shelf is available now, priced at $3,995, without drives. The company plans to market a smaller shelf soon, it says, and is also working on Solaris drivers.

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