ATA over Ethernet

While reading LinuxJournal (I think) the other day, I came across an advert for ATA over Ethernet (AoE), from Coraid.

I'd never heard of it before but, as someone in the process of updating the machinery from big and noisy servers that sit in my office to something quieter (of which more another day), the thought of having remote access to some large disk over the network, without having to relocate a potentially noisy box elsewhere, appeals.

Many will be shouting 'Network Attached Storage' (NAS) about now, but I have problems with NAS. The first is that most do not support NFS, a problem in a network with a large number of Unix and Linux servers, rather than Windows boxes (which of course is supported by all of them). My second issue is just one of additional expense; I already have servers, adding another just for storage seems excessive when I could just extend the space I have on the servers I already have.

AoE presents some promise and would make it very easy to stuff the drives somewhere without adding the server to the mix. In a dedicated server environment, I can certainly see a rack of drives being easily shared over Gigabit Ethernet to a bank of servers that could be located in other parts of the building, but still with access to the main storage array. OS support is quite wide too, with support for Windows, Linux, OS X and, as Ben Rockwood notes, now Solaris. Once again, I can feel my thoughts towards Solaris, ZFS and mammoth disks appealing...

From a small business standpoint, the current solutions though are rack-focused and, comparatively, expensive, so I can't see an immediate shift here compared to eSATA or FireWire as the more likely solution.