On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
Actually I meant to say, 9fans only price. I'll also give really good
prices for the shelf with 10 blades as well. We sell these for $2,495
but I'll sell one to 9fans folk at the `we don't make any money' price
of $1,500.
These are just raw disks, or is there a file system on there that does
snapshots?
<theskinny>
AoE is a really light protocol for wrapping ATA commands in
Ethernet frames. The EtherDrive blade is a nanoserver
that sits on the network serving AoE and issuing ATA commands
to its attached disk. The shelf provides a way for each blade
to get its power and physical ethernet port.
So you plug each EtherDrive into a switch, yourself into the
(same) switch, and you access the disks -- whether it's ten or
ten thousand.
</theskinny>
As an aside, since AoE is just a wrapper for the ATA commands,
you can take a disk out of a machine, put it on an ED blade,
and remount it over the network.
So to answer your question, from the client side a full
shelf looks like ten disks.
We're currently developing raid / volume management software
for plan 9 for our raidblade product. It should be released
within the month.
Sam
