[SLL] Rant: ATA-over-Ethernet 0x88a2

[Ed L Cashin]

Hi.  I noticed this thread and think that I might have some things of
interest to contribute.  I'll address points in the order they
appeared in the thread.

Coraid has plans to sell PATA equipment as long as there is customer
demand for it.  We are not SATA snobs.  :)

Yes, the products are geared more toward large installations than home
use.  We've noticed a fair bit of interest from home consumers,
though.  It's just that we haven't yet found the right product for
that market yet.

There is an open source AoE target, the vblade, at sourceforge now.
It runs in userspace, not in the kernel, so it is probably more fun to
hack on if you don't already hack the kernel.  You can find the vblade
here:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoetools/

The AoE network protocol is open---anyone can implement it.

With any of the redundant levels of software raid (e.g., 5 and 10), a
disk can fail and the raid is still perfectly usable in degraded mode.
The disk can be replaced and re-added to the RAID while the storage is
online.

We have tested with RAIDs of up to 30 disks (layering them if using
more than 27), and have customers using large arrays.  I think it's
probably more practical to make smaller (say 10-disk) RAIDs and put
them together with LVM.

-- 
  Ed L Cashin <ecashin at coraid.com>