When I first heard about ATA over Ethernet[1] (AoE) my thought was that this could be a really interesting technology if you could get low costs adapters to stick on drives and then string an arbitrary number of drives together via Ethernet.
Instead, the initial hardware products resembled typical multi-drive SAN appliances. I did eventually run across a product that worked the way I envisioned: http://www.jwe.com.tw/product_04.htm Sold as a "development kit" for $75 ($35 shipping). The board has one SATA and one Ethernet port and implements AoE. With the availability low-cost ARM-based SoC devices like the Raspberry Pi I've been wondering if it would be practical to make a single drive AoE adapter that hits the $30 to $50 price point, running open source firmware. The one obvious missing thing from the readily available SoCs are SATA ports, but I bet there are some consumer NAS SoCs that include them. While writing this I ran across: LayerWalker Technology http://www.layerwalker.com/products.html#LW6800_LW16800 which makes an SoC specifically for AoE, though some of the information suggests it only has an IDE interface, suggesting it is a dated part. Elsewhere they mention SATA support, but unclear if they are referring to their SoC part or something else. Developing the firmware for such a device won't be trivial, if you want high performance and reliability. The easy approach would be to just run Linux with one of the AoE servers[2,3,4], but that could incur a lot of extra overhead and complexity. But it may be the only practical approach, unless one of these servers can be ported to some other open source RTOS that runs on the SoC. Any thoughts on how this could be done easier? Whether it makes sense? -Tom 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet 2. http://code.google.com/p/aoeserver/ 3. http://code.google.com/p/qaoed/ 4. http://code.google.com/p/ggaoed/ _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking