Jay Leafey jay.leafey@mindless.com wrote:
As an aside, has anyone looked at using GFS with the ATA-Over-Ethernet stuff from Coraid? It appears to have the potential for better performance than iSCSI (no walking up and down the IP stack).
I looked at their design and it doesn't seem to address the multi-targeting aspects very well. In other words, I see a lot of complications for clustering because they have not addressed them, which is left to GFS to address. I think I'd rather use another storage solution that either handles multi-targetting better, or is just much faster for close to the same distance limitations.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the next generation of multi-targettable SCSI. It is far higher performing and very competitive with FC-AL on speed, but at a massively reduced price-point and even less overhead. The only disadvantage is length, limited to 8m (~26'), although it can be repeated just as far as AoE. So it's ideal for clustering in the same closet/room, or repeated to nearby areas.
I personally see AoE getting crushed between multi-vendor FC-AL/iSCSI lengths and SAS performance. Especially given that SAS already uses the proven SCSI-2 protocol and stack, whereas AoE is one vendor right now. I know a lot of people are talking about AoE because they've done the "conference circuit," but once people hear about SAS, they quickly reconsider.
For more on SAS, see my blog: http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/08/serial-storage-is-future.html