26 Sep
2017
26 Sep
'17
7:39 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
You probably know Brantley Coile did ata over
Ethernet. AOE is a simple
protocol so the client side driver is simple. He ran plan9 on his
controller. One per rack. Basically you have a storage area network. Adding
disks becomes very easy. His company is back in business if you want to buy
some!
AOE is probably a better idea than FCoE, fiber channel over Ethernet, with
its requirement for a reliable transport. On the other hand, may be there
is need for encrypted channels all the way to disks.
AoE: All the quality you'd expect from low end ATA drives couple with all
the reliability of low-end consumer grade ethernet. What could go wrong?
AoE really punted on all the reliability stuff, so if you have any kind of
congested network it's a total disaster. Plus, who doesn't want to access
storage via an arcane protocol designed so you could latch registers
effective, but not so you can encode requests so.
Sorry for the rant, but I've had to deal with too much low-end gear
recently and it makes me grumpy and AoE back in the early 2000's was a
total S***show of low-end, poor quality implementations....
Warner
On Sep 26,
2017, at 7:41 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
So maybe Ron Minnich will remember this. Back in the days of 10Mbit
ethernet I was pushing for 100Mbit. Part of what I wanted was ethernet
all the way out to the disk drives. It was a little ahead of its time,
the idea was to run Linux on the general purpose processor and be able
to send the questions to the drive rather than slurping all the data
across and pawing through it on the main CPU. That was part of the
idea, the other part was power over ethernet and you need more space?
Just plug in a drive.
It's been over 20 years since I proposed that and things are starting
to look up a little. Western Digital made a version of what I wanted,
an ethernet attached drive with a key/value store on the drive. Not
quite there but closer. And I just stumbled across this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center_bridging
Not sure how well that will work but it's interesting that people are
working on it.
> On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 01:42:43PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> Yes. I thought it made a lot of sense.
>
> Quoting Tony Finch <dot(a)dotat.at>:
>
>> Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>>
>>> I once thought of developing a computer where everything from the
>> core
>>> functions to the peripherals was a network node. In effect replacing
>> the
>>> bus. I found references to a Cambridge U (UK) computer system that
>>> purported to do just that but couldn't find any more info on it.
>>
>> The Desk Area Network, perhaps?
>> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/dan.html
>>
>> Tony.
>> --
>> f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h
punycode
>> Malin, Hebrides: Southeast 3 or 4,
increasing 5 or 6, occasionally 7
>> later in
>> west. Moderate becoming rough later. Fair. Good.
>
>
>
> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." -
Ferdinand Sor,
> Method for Guitar
>
> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." --
Samuel
Goldwyn
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm