ILTA White Papers

Infrastructure Technologies

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ILTA White Paper Infrastructure Technologies 22 I n this age of e-discovery, virtual machine snapshots and never ending flows of e-mail messages, the prospect of gaining large storage capacity at a low cost is very appealing. While proprietary SANs yield great speed, features and flexibility, their benefits come at a premium, and they can require costly dedicated networks and and have burdensome TCP/IP processing overhead. Advanced technology attachment over Ethernet (often written as ATA over Ethernet or simply AoE) meets the need for large storage that is inexpensive, fast and robust. AoE puts low level ATA disk commands directly into Ethernet packets that travel between the server and disk subsystem. While this sounds complicated, AoE takes novel advantage of long used, well understood and reliable technologies such as ATA and Ethernet and commodity hardware such as serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drives to create an elegant storage solution. In fact, the entire specification for AoE, written by Brantley Coile, creator of the PIX firewall, is just 12 pages long (http://www. coraid.com/RESOURCES/AoE-Protocol-Definition). Working with AoE is a bit like working with the iSCSI (Internet small computer systems interface) protocol. nathan c. smith mcKee, voorhees & sease, p.l.c. Use ATA over Ethernet to Create a SAN

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