>>On Thu, 26 May 2005, Florin Iucha wrote: >>>Do you have any links/references/howto on using Fiber Channel? I was >>>interested in the same thing, but I did not find any good references. >Ken Fuchs wrote: >>Rather than using Fibre Channel (FC), one might consider ATA/SATA over >>Ethernet (AoE). There's a good article on AoE in the June issue of >>Linux Magazine. There's also a less technical article on AoE in the >>June issue of Linux Journal. >>At least for new equipment, AoE network devices will be a about 1/10 the >>cost of FC devices. Josh Welch wrote: >Anyway, from what I've found ATA over Ethernet seems like a one horse >show, which raises my suspicions somewhat. More interesting to me is >iSCSI. I can see their arguments regarding the unnecessary additional >overhead required by wrapping a storage protocol in TCP/IP when the >disks are only 3 feet away, but it seems to me that it is simpler to >wrap something in TCP/IP than to figure out a new transport layer >without screwing it up. >There is a pretty good Linux iSCSI target in development right now, >http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=108475. I just >wish I had sparkier hardware to really test it out against. iSCSI is fine technology, but the overhead of TCP/IP is huge. Please note that many consider iSCSI to be too slow and complicated. AoE is fast and simple, but may be too simple for many applications. On the other hand, there isn't a complete Linux solution for AoE clustering yet, so AoE is single node only for now. Sincerely, Ken Fuchs <kfuchs at winternet.com>