On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 01:03:14AM -1000, Stephan Fabel spake thusly: > Yeah, using Coraid. However they refused to recommend any third-party > vendor. Seems like a (new?) policy with them.
While I really like AoE and think their technology is great after having used it for years, Coraid has disappointed in a few ways: 1. They don't seem to market worth a darn. I've never heard of them anywhere except very rarely on technical lists such as this, and I frequent the sorts of places where their message should be seen. 2. They didn't foresee the advent of virtualization and the need to serve up smallish slices of disks instead of the whole physical disks until late in the game. Back in 2008 or so I had to return some Coraid storage for this reason. 3. They have failed to keep recent versions of the initiator in the mainstream kernel. People try it, everything is broken due to the ancient and broken initiator, and then dismiss AoE. 4. There are performance-killing alignment issues in their vblade target when used with Xen virtualization that I've just never come up with a satisfactory solution to. 5. They have achieved no integration with the major OS distributions so you have to hand-craft your own RPMs, init scripts, etc. to make things run smoothly. While iSCSI is baked into, for example, RHEL, in a very convenient way. I suspect their solution to most of the above is to buy their official product and support. But that isn't how people get their feet wet with such a technology nor how a technology based on a free and open system grows. They seem to be ignoring large segments of the market and focusing on only large disk deployments for things like video render farms etc. But mindshare is important. I've been watching iscsi eat their lunch for years and I'm sad to say it looks like it may continue this way even though AoE is a faster, easier, simpler solution. Although I have been a big proponent of AoE since 2005 I have finally had to start deploying iSCSI myself this past year for the abovementioned reasons. -- Tracy Reed
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