Data storage requirements for every company grow larger every year, and the data storage costs grow with them. Unfortunately, storage arrays and storage area networks (SAN) have become a larger portion of the Information Technology budget every year as well. Companies that are looking for lower priced, higher performance alternatives to a traditional SAN now can take advantage of a relatively new technology called ATA over Ethernet (AoE) to meet their needs at a reasonable price.

External storage arrays have become increasingly popular because companies can add hard drives and storage as needed and make it available to all their application servers. Because hard drives have more capacity every year, that means the storage arrays get upgraded every few years as well. As well as storage arrays, many companies are also upgrading servers because of the availability of multi-core processors, higher memory densities, and ten gigabit network connections.

There are three well known SAN technologies in use for the powerful servers to connect to the storage arrays at the block level, which are Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Servers also can connect to storage at the file system level using NFS or CIFS. These protocols are all complex protocols that require either lots of server processor cycles to operate, or dedicated host bus adapters (HBA). In addition to driving up the server costs, FC and FCoE require advanced storage switches.

ATA over Ethernet (AoE) storage devices are able to provide more storage capacity at higher storage access speeds and for a lower price than Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Furthermore, AoE has very low overhead so processor load is low and HBA adapters are inexpensive. The storage network is created with standard Ethernet switches, and is inherently secure because it is local to the servers and storage arrays. The systems also scale to large volumes of storage better than FC or iSCSI based storage arrays because there is no expensive and complex internal control system required.

AoE storage systems have an advantage in many deployment situations. Better performance, more storage, and a lower price is a good combination for the ATA over Ethernet storage systems.

Find out more about AoE storage and how to design a low cost SAN from Adcap Network Systems.

Author: Rolf Versluis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged with: • • • • • •

Filed under: Data Networking • Datacenter

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!