Hi Walter -
in 2005, Robin was working on ATA over Ethernet -
"In 2005, Robin Frost quietly posted a note on the Apple Forums that he was developing an ATA over Ethernet storage product for Mac OS X. ATA over Ethernet works below the IP level and is very fast — Frost says you get over 100 MB per second on each Ethernet port.
Now, in 2007, Coraid seems to take responsibility for developing ATA over Ethernet -
http://coraid.com/index.html
From the 2frost website -
Using Mac AoE turnkey storage, single disks or RAID sets of disks are published as 'AoE Drives' on the network where they can be discovered, formatted and partitioned, and then used just like regular ATA drives - but in a shared network environment.
The 2ºFrost AoE Driver™ for Mac OS X provides Mac Users with the ability to directly access Mac AoE disks and/or RAID sets on the network as if they were locally attached ATA drives.
• Automatically supports Ethernet 9000-byte "Jumbo Frames" for maximum performance
• Automatically supports multiple ethernet cards/ports for connecting AoE storage
• New proprietary technology provides auto discovery and auto mounting of AoE devices attached to a Mac.
REPLY - this surely sounds very interesting, and companies like Coraid make the arrays. I wish you could commment more on this.
I found this driver on PCMALL for $399, but not the entire turnkey system that Robin was describing -
PC Mall Part #: 7297314
OOPS !!!! found it -
PC Mall Part #: 7297302
You get the 2Frost SAN with 5 Terabytes of shared storage in a Linux box for $21,869.99. Now is this self contained - does it require a host computer (like Lairdshare) to control the Metadata, or run MetaSAN - or what. Are there any details that you would like to tell us ? The PC Mall descripition states that this is only for 3 client workstations.
Bob Zelin
