On Jun 22, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
So, explain to me why they are comparing themselves to iSCSI (a routable, distributed, wide area protocol) rather than Fibrechannel (a non-routable, local, wireline protocol)?
I'm confused by this as well, as when I first encountered Coraid via an ad in LJ, they made a point to differentiate themselves from iSCSI as the ideal "local link" SAN solution with far less overhead for single-site SANs than iSCSI would impose.
In addition: "The "EtherDrive" SANs and are priced as low as $1.75 per GB".Dell FibreChannel SANs are about $3.00 per GB *retail* on small systems.Interesting, but far from compelling.
Well, to get good performance out of AoE "EtherDrive" systems, you need a GigE NIC, standard Cat5/Cat6 cabling and (optionally, if you're building bigger than a single "shelf") a good managed switch.
To FiberChannel to work, you need a $1k or so host adapter, fiber optic cables and (again, if you're building out more than one unit) a fiberchannel switch.
Additional infrastructure to support even a single fiberchannel cabinet on a single server is many times more expensive than for AoE. The prices of the actual hard drives are being ignored for this cursory comparison, too, as price/GB is generally in favor of ATA/ SATA drives, though you'll be replacing ATA/SATA drives more often than FC/AL or SCSI drives.
Right now, ATA-over-Ethernet systems look great for use as "I need a fuck-ton of storage for on-site backups and some hardware to support cheap off-site HD-based backups."
If you actually want high-throughput, both GigE (for AoE) and FiberChannel are going to be your bottleneck unless you do link aggregation.
I'd love to have one of these EtherDrive shelves for use instead of a tape library for on-site backups, myself.
Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
