We are migrating to a webcluster with a Coraid SR1521 as our SAN. We have been extremely impressed with the stability, speed, and reliability of the device. Also their tech support has been amazingly responsive, usually responding within an hour from a random request to their email support address. Pros: Very fast, AoE as a protocol has little to no overhead, and the hardware is well made. Simple, the setup and immediate use of the device is dead simple. The vblades show up in Linux as a standard block device. Linux support, there is support for the AoE devices right out of the box with the stock kernel. To get the latest drivers and compile them is easy as well. Inexpensive, for around $6000 you can have a 6.5TB array available to all your servers on commodity ethernet hardware. Cons: Ubuntu doesn't handle init of the AoE drives very well. It takes a lot of tweaking to get the AoE devices discovered and mounted on boot. Mainline Linux kernel doesn't have the latest AoE driver for some reason. The new driver has multipathing for much greater speed. Not a "true" SAN solution, you are not paying for a bunch of fancy hardware or software that ensures redundancy. You can get a couple of Coraids and do raid across them for redundancy but it is not quite the same. On the other hand, you are not paying $100,000 either. Commercial software support is lacking, we really want to use our Coraid to store VMware ESX virtual server images, however the Coraid is not supported by VMware for use as a SAN. This means we will have to come up with another solution if we use ESX as our environment. That is most everything I can think of off the top of my head right now. If you have any other questions let me know. Thanks. Bret. On Tuesday 25 March 2008 7:12:39 pm Chad Walstrom wrote: > Just wondering if anyone has had experience with the ATA over Ethernet > (AOE) offerings from Coraid. Current packages for use with Linux 2.6 > kernels include aoe-tools (for attaching) and vblade (for serving). I > had a chance to demo one of their boxes, and it worked out relatively > nicely, but I had a hiccup with Solaris (which I think I figured out). > Just wondering what others out there think about the technology. > > Chad > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -- Bret Baptist Senior Network Administrator bbaptist at iexposure.com Internet Exposure, Inc. http://www.iexposure.com (612)676-1946 x17 Providing Internet Services since 1995 Web Development ~ Search Engine Marketing ~ Web Analytics Network Security ~ On Demand Tech Support ~ E-Mail Marketing ------------------------------------------