Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonkabonka | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me what ATA over Ethernet[0] promised. I bought one of Coraid's Parallel IDE to 100mbit single-device developer kits to experiment with, and then attempted to use their blade software to serve up mdadm devices. Worked okay for short periods of time (5-10 minutes) before the client machines would throw a wobbly and irrecoverably corrupt the filesystem (tried both XFS and JFS) on the device.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet

View on HN

I helped maintain a VMWare infra backed with CoRAID’s ATA over Ethernet tech. It worked fairly well at the time. I want to say it was ZFS on Solaris.

Performance could have been a bit better, but this was back when 128gb enterprise SSDs were nearly the largest you could buy.

I always found this protocol fascinating due to its apparent simplicity. As a first-year student, I was fiddling with configuring the kernel, and found the ATA-over-Ethernet driver and immediately thought I'd understood it: just throw the ATA commands in an Ethernet frame. After college, I started working at Oracle who partnered with high-end storage vendors for their projects. I was amazed and figured it would be so much cheaper to use Linux :)

I used iSCSI with iPXE back in the day to boot a whole network (~120 machines) of Windows boxes. It was served on a single server by a RAID 10 array of 15k SCSI disks built on Debian. Good times; I'd forgotten about that! iSCSI was solid even with Windows, so you know it's good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com