[ale] AOE, it really works

[Randal Jarrett K4RSJ]

Hey, guess what!! Something that is not from /.


Yesterday a friend brought over a AOE (ATA over Ethernet) eval board
that he bought from Coraid.  
http://www.coraid.com/
We went to Fry's an he bought the 200GB Seagate drive that they have on
sale.

After he connected everything up it only took me about 15-20 minutes to
bring the drive on line. 
I'm running Suse 9.3 pro, with 2.6.11.4-21.7-default kernel.  It already
has the aoe module in the library.
His home system is a Mandrake 10.1 with 2.6.8... kernel and it does not
have aoe.

Formatting the drive appeared to take about the same amount of time as
if it was installed internally.

Once formatted and mounted I ran a few tests to see what the performance
was like. My network in 10/100Mb fdx.
I tried copying files of various sizes and directories with a mix of
files in them, noting the times.  
I then repeated the same to a local drive and then to a local drive on a
different controller.

The copies to the aoe drive and to the internal drive on another
controller were within a few percent (~10) of each other.
The copy to another drive on the same controller was about 20% slower
than the other two.

I imagine that using their SATA board (available shortly) that supports
Gig-E connection will be much faster.

If you get their shelf with multiple drive trays you can software raid
or LVM to configure the drives  however you would like.

The eval units are expensive, $300 without drive, but for business uses
the shelf unit with multiple drives appears to be cost effective.

There was an article in the June 2005 issue of Linux Journal that does a
very good job of describing how it works.

Randy




-- 

Randal Jarrett  <rsj at radio.org>
RSJ Consulting, Inc
Lawrenceville, GA
(770) 822-1096  home
(770) 598-3251  cell
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