The ATA over Ethernet (AoE) Protocol
ATA over Ethernet connects ATA disks to remote hosts via Ethernet, providing sites with a low-cost storage area network built from commodity components.
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
Spurred by data hungry applications and legislature mandating long periods of data retention, IT departments are doubling storage requirements each year. To keep up with the demand and to simplify the management of such enormous volumes of information, many organizations have adopted storage area networks (SANs) based on Fibre Channel, which consolidates disparate hardware into a shared storage pool. And while Fibre Channel is complicated and expensive, its speed has historically surpassed other networking solutions, justifying its higher price tag.
But as the SAN market grew using 2 Gbps Fibre Channel, Ethernet attained higher and higher speeds. Today, off-the-shelf servers are equipped with multiple 1 Gbps Ethernet interfaces, and 10 Gbps network interface cards are available. Due to the high volumes at which Ethernet is manufactured hardware such as multi-port Gigabit Ethernet switches are hundreds of dollars, as opposed to thousands of dollars for Fibre Channel switches. Ethernet is now fast enough for the most demanding networked storage applications at a very reasonable cost.
Over the past decade, low cost hard disks have also undergone dramatic improvements. ATA/IDE disks are now available with storage capacity of 400 GB and mean time between failure (MTBF) ratings of 1 million hours, all at rock bottom prices.
So, what can one build from low-cost networking gear, high-capacity hard drives, and a little bit of software? ATA over Ethernet (AoE) — a SAN at a fraction of the cost of Fibre Channel.
ATA over Ethernet
