zfs discuss - Nov 2005 - ZFS ATA over Ethernet and OpenSolaris

On Coraids (Inventor of AoE) website, they claim the?r drivers will also work on
Solaris.

So my question is: Will there be any technical limitations  regarding
implementation of ZFS and AoE ?

If not yet possible, the developers of OpenSolaris might consider this option as
a natural step I guess. What do You people think ?

With cheap disk attachments over an ethernet, and with ZFS, I think Solaris will
become very competitive.

Just my Cents, have a nice weekend out there.

Br, Daniel Mersebak
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Daniel Mersebak wrote:
> On Coraids (Inventor of AoE) website, they claim the?r drivers will also
work
> on Solaris. 
cool!
> So my question is: Will there be any technical limitations  regarding 
> implementation of ZFS and AoE ?
Limitation?  I don''t think so.  As long as they provide a block storage
device, ZFS will be happy.
> If not yet possible, the developers of OpenSolaris might consider this 
> option as a natural step I guess. What do You people think ?
I think it will have a short life.  Since the protocol does not run over
IP, it will not have the features provided by IP, which many people find
very useful (routing, multipathing, IPsec, NAT, DHCP, etc.)  Meanwhile,
the "high  protocol overhead" of IP is largely  myth.  Actually, I
thought
that myth died with Netware...
> With cheap disk attachments over an ethernet, and with ZFS, I think 
> Solaris will become very competitive.
Actually, I think that without ZFS, AoE will have an even shorter life.
All it takes is one data corruption due to something along the wire
and you''re toast.  ZFS can at least detect these and at most will
recover gracefully.

Note: I haven''t studied the ATA protocol, but I seriously doubt that
it assumes an unreliable transport -- which all networks are.  If the
AoE driver implementation does automated retries and congestion control,
then they have reinvented parts of TCP/IP or iSCSI.
  -- richard