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

[Russell Evans]

On Mon, 16 May 2005 12:32:08 -0400
"Ed L Cashin" <ecashin at coraid.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 


I thought this post to the DCLUG provided some interesting points about
the CTO of Coraid so I am coping it here.

Thank you
Russell


dclug] Wed,	May 18: DCLUG meeting: Brantley Coile on Network Storage

The May 2005 meeting of Washington DC Linux user group will take
place on Wednesday, May 18, 7pm. 

This month Brantley Coile, CTO of network storage startup Coraid, will
give a talk titled "EtherDrive Storage Blades and the History of
Networks and Storage". He will cover history of disks and networking
and how they came together.  From IBM's first hard disks in the 50's,
to today's 400GB monsters, and from Bob Metcalfe's 3Mbps Ethernet to
today's 10Gbps links, we are witnessing enormous advances, with no end
in sight. Brantley will outline the ideas and future of network
storage, using NFS, iSCSI and AoE protocols.

Brantley has been doing Unix stuff for over 20 years, first with
Seventh Edition Unix.  Brantley did pioneering work in embedding Unix
in the 1980s, and was the first to develop a disk caddy for SCSI disk
in 1986.  Brantley is also known for the invention of stateful packet
inspection and tcp based load sharing network applicance. He worked on
Cisco PIX and the Cisco LocalDirector. He is a co-inventor of the AoE
protocol, used in his company's EtherDrive and RAIDblade storage
products.

The meeting location is our usual 2025 M street, NW in downtown DC.
There will be signs in front of the building. The location is within 3
nearby Metro stops, both on the red (Dupont, Farragut North) and
blue/orange (Farragut West, Foggy Bottom [a bit of a hike]) lines.

Parking in the area is available for approximately $5; there's even
parking in the building itself. Street parking is free after 6:30pm,
but scarce. There's a parking lot at 23rd St. between M and L that is
not enforced after 7pm (people have successfully parked there for
years---no one we know was ticketed or towed yet, but it could happen).

The DCLUG meeting dates for 2005 are: Jun 15, Jul 20, Aug 17, Sep 21,
Oct 19, Nov 16 and Dec 21.

For other details, see our home page

	http://dclug.tux.org