TECHNOLOGY
The CORAID EtherDrive family of SAN products are built upon ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), an open lightweight storage area network protocol. Designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA storage devices over Ethernet networks, AoE gives the possibility to build SANs with low-cost, standard technologies. AoE is the simplest possible way of sharing a disk drive through a network. The communication that would take place between motherboard and IDE disk drive is arranged into data packets and sent through the Ethernet. AoE is not built on IP, TCP, or other protocols. It is simple and direct. Packets are addressed to devices using their low-level Ethernet addresses (MAC addresses), not IP addresses. Well known technology author Dr. Michael Covington, PhD gives fresh new insight into AoE and EtherDrive storage technology in
An Overview of CORAID Technology and ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE). Because AoE is an open protocol embraced by the open source community, a variety of
AoE drivers and tools
are available, free of charge, for download from
SourceForge.net as part of the
aoetools project.
For cutting edge developments in AoE initiator technology, check the
aoe Linux Proving Grounds BLOG for experimental patches developed at CORAID for the Linux aoe driver. From the more esoteric realm, check the
CORAID Chief Technology Officer BLOG for muses about a wide variety of subjects, including AoE, programming, storage, and computer history.
| |
|
|
ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) is a simple block storage protocol that uses Ethernet to transport ATA disk commands, without burdening the packets with TCP/IP overhead. |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| AoE is a robust network protocol designed to work on a lossy Ethernet network. Therefore the protocol must handle packet loss and packet errors without affecting the payload data integrity. |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), a lightweight SAN protocol, is open and available free without a license. |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| A performance comparison study of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) running in a VMware® ESX™ environment shows that AoE delivers better throughput than Fibre Channel. Using the Iometer benchmarking tool originally developed at Intel Corporation, I/O loads were generated for testing a single virtual machine using VMware ESX Server connected to a CORAID EtherDrive SAN storage array. |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|