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.
> On Sep 26, 2017, at 7:41 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@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@dotat.at>:
>>
>>> Wesley Parish <wes.parish@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@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
>