Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/4636
www.iltanet.org Infrastructure Technologies 25 use ata over ethernet to create a san US$4,000. For about US$3,700, 15 one-terabyte serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drives can be purchased and combined as a RAID 5 group. About 13 terabytes of RAID 5 storage for less than US$8,000 works out to about 60 cents per RAID 5 gigabyte. This configuration would not have the advanced caching, snapshots and other performance enhancements your favorite SAN vendor can deliver, but for reasonably fast and reliable storage for backups, electronic discovery repositories or a virtual machine library, it should be more than adequate. Commercial manufacturers of AoE hardware include CORAID and some small network appliance manufacturers. While CORAID is the company that seems to be driving the AoE market right now, the AoE protocol specification is open, making the barrier to entry relatively low for new companies or even existing SAN vendors who would like to add AoE as an option to their existing offerings. The openfiler project (http://www.openfiler.com/) has created easy-to-use Linux storage appliance software that offers a variety of SAN and network attached storage (NAS) options including AoE. They also offer commercial support and a disk-on-chip option for turning a commodity server into a SAN appliance. TIME TO TEST Once accepted by the VMware community, interest in AoE should really grow. For now, AoE continues to gain acceptance among innovators and early adopters looking to save money on their large storage purchases. Organizations looking at AoE should consider that there are few barriers to testing this technology in most environments, and that what they stand to gain is significant: a large-capacity, flexible and inexpensive storage system that is both fast and robust. ILTA We're talking about infrastructure technologies online right now. ILTA MEMBERS, join your peers online in the ILTA E-Group discussion forums. This popular member benefit is a members-only, topic-driven, online forum designed to improve communication among peers. There is no better place to get advice, exchange ideas, learn from first-hand experience and benefit from the knowledge of other legal IT professionals. How does it work? Log in to E-Groups from the ILTA homepage and subscribe the forums that interest you. New posts and replies will be sent to your e-mail inbox as often as you like. Post a message or reply of your own to get answers and recommendations from your peers. Who can subscribe? Any employee of a member law firm or law department can subscribe to any ILTA e-group. TAKE THE CONVERSATION ONLINE Don't miss out on one of the most important benets of ILTA membership.