A new protocol allows for the usage of an Ethernet network and a bunch of low cost disks to store large amounts of data.
“Anyway…,” the boss burbles in simulated intelligence mode, “I was just wandering through the department today and a thought struck me. What with the rising cost of disk it might be an interesting plan to use our networks as a storage medium…”
He goes on to paraphrase the food-waste-product that we fed him, while commenting that he’s fired off an order for 20 drums of Cat-5.
The explosion is inevitable. The head of department, whilst in practical terms about as useful as loopback plug for an electric type-writer, did spend about six years teaching networking fundamentals to first year university students.
— The BOFH wins an award from his peer group…, from 1997’s BOFH collection by Simon Travaglia.
Nine years later, the befuddled boss of BOFH lore looks prophetic. The ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol creates a storage area network (SAN), using an Ethernet network along with those ATA drives, NetworkWorld writer Brantley Coile (who co-authored AoE) reported.
Coile described how AoE would be less complex to implement than Fibre Channel or TCP/IP. AoE does not require TCP/IP to carry ATA disk commands.
AoE’s approach uses cheap ATA disks to store data, and conceivably has unlimited scalability. It works with Ethernet to enable the SAN:
AoE is a command/response protocol that puts Ethernet connectors on diskdrives. AoE clients use a block device driver (initiator), which lets a very large number of AoE devices (targets) appear as local disks. The AoE protocol enables a driver to discover target devices using configuration information stored in those devices.
Two types of messages are transferred via AoE. One carries ATA disk commands, and the other is used for discovering AoE targets.
Those targets can be single disks, or arrays of RAID volumes; the storage devices can be partitioned as needed. “Because AoE devices are block storage, they can be used as raw storage disks or mounted with any disk file system. AoE devices can be managed with volume-management software tools and become part of large storage systems,” Coile wrote.
With AoE drivers included in many Linux distributions, they could enable the cheap creation of massive storage systems to support demanding media types like video and images.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
