Just wondering if anyone out there has any opinions or better still experience with Coraid's AoE products in a centos environment?
We're looking at developing a very basic active/standby 2 node cluster which will need a shared storage component. It would be a huge bonus if other servers could also use the storage device. Originally I was looking at the Dell/EMC iSCSI solution as it's a cheaper solution than fibre channel. However, the performance issues without using a TCP offload HBA are a bit of a concern.
Then I found the Coraid (www.coraid.com) products based on the open standard AoE protocol. It's got a number of benefits including: price, less protocol overhead for the server and the ability to use any disks where as "enterprise" approved products form the likes of Dell/Sun etc only support 250gb sata disks at the moment.
I guess my concern is that it's a new technology that's not been widely adopted so far and all the issues that go along with that.
Any options or feedback would be really helpful.
Cheers,
Nick